2018-04-08T09:36:16-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/Octopress2016-07-21T15:12:00-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2016/07/21/nostalgia-films-a-new-breed-of-filmAmidst a raging torrent of smarmy self-aware postmodern / post-postmodern film, a new sub-genre has been emerging in recent years: that of the “nostalgia” film. I posit that “nostalgia film” is a distinct sub-genre and can be separated from both postmodern / post-postmodern film and reboot / franchise film.

What is “nostalgia film”?

Plainly put, nostalgia film is film which directly or circuitously references a previous incarnation of the same larger epistemic system in an attempt to connect with a viewer. Nostalgia film is no longer content simply to imply a sense of nostalgia and self-reference, but instead relies on those qualities in an attempt to deliver a certain level of emotional content.

Films have been stealing subject matter from each other for as long as there have been films, and remakes / reboots have been recycling the same basic plots in different packages. The differences between nostalgia films and remakes are the level of exposed self-awareness in what they’re doing and an attempt to capitalize off of that self-referential nature, either monetarily or artistically.

Television series like “12 Monkeys” (a lackluster attempt at rebooting and expanding Terry Gilliam’s dark feature-length remake of “La Jetée”) are content to simply reboot – or in modern film/television parlance, “reimagine” – without explanation, whereas nostalgia film relies on that very connection with their target audience.

Some modern examples

It is somewhat interesting to look at the genesis of the original TMNT franchise, as it was originally meant as a sort of pastiche of Cerebus, Ronin, and Daredevil, and in its original film adaptation hosted two relatively tame sequels, as well as a multi-season animated television show, comic book line, and untold hoards of plastic action figures and merchandising of all kinds.

The new film mainly capitalized monetarily from the original nostalgia behind the TMNT franchise, as there are no explicit references to any of the original properties (although there are some inferences, peppered throughout, for more avid fans of the franchise). This could be considered an example of an “inherent or implicit nostalgia film” – the most subtle of the nostalgia film types.

It should be noted that this is the only way I’m referring to this film as subtle in any way. Please take with a large grain of metaphoric salt.

Even though the Jurassic Park universe hosted a series of three canon films before this one (and completely discounting the lost message of environmental caution which author Michael Crichton had written into the original Jurassic Park novel), Jurassic World is the first of the films to explicitly expound upon nostalgia built in the earlier films – we can categorize this as an “explicit nostalgia film”.

Characters in the film seem in awe of a park which had never opened. We are expected, as fans, to gaze with wonder upon vehicles which would make no sense to someone who had not watched the previous films. If there was any doubt that this was included exclusively for fan service (and not just a callback to epistemic information presented in an earlier portion of this film universe), one only has to look at Jake Johnson’s shirt. Remember, the park on his shirt never opened and was considered a secret.

"This isn’t the epistemic system you’re looking for."

There are, as with most explicit nostalgia films, “callbacks” to the original. These are emotional leverage, designed to evoke the same feelings which we experienced when we saw the original film/films – and, by association, the innocence and wonder of the nostalgia for that time period when we originally watched it/them. This is one of the reasons why I believe that certain age groups are generally more susceptible to this from particular films, as it tends to coincide with a more ideal period in their developmental phase.

It may seem as though I’ve gotten to the party a little late by choosing The Force Awakens as an example of a genre film, especially after George Lucas beat the genre almost to death during its naissance with his insanely terrible and derivative prequilogy. I’m including The Force Awakens because it actually does this so much better than any of the three Lucas-helmed films ever did – by telling a story that you’ve essentially heard before, but just different enough that it can be a different film. The prequilogy wasn’t a work of postmodernism in any meaninful way, but was more of a color-by-numbers attempt to work backwards to create a backstory – so I feel perfectly rationalized in ignoring it for the purposes of this discourse. To somewhat paraphrase a take on the similarities between A New Hope and The Force Awakens, which go far beyond simple Campbellian monomyth:

A poor orphan on a desert planet who is unaware of the Force finds a droid that carries a secret galaxy-saving message involving a legendary Jedi and includes plans that must be delivered to the rebel forces so they can disable the shields of a celestial-body-sized weapon and utterly destroy it by X-Wing fighters targeting a small, overlooked utility port. The Millennium Falcon, despite being ridiculed and laughed at as junk is far faster and more agile than anything that goes up against it, including much newer TIE fighters. And a black-clad Force villain with daddy/mommy issues.

I can’t fault a film for relying on a working formula; the more interesting aspect of this is how the characters seem completely aware of the nostalgia which is being projected onto the viewer. For example, Oscar Isaac’s “Poe Dameron” is utterly fascinated by the legends of the rebel pilots who preceded him, Daisy Ridley’s “Rey” idolizes the legends of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and Adam Driver’s “Kylo Ren” gives extensive fan-service to Darth Vader. These are very explicit manifestations of the type of rabid Star Wars fandom which exists in the real world, projected into the film’s epistemological system for the benefit of the fans. These characters want to be their predecessors as badly as their fans wanted to be them when they first watched the original Star Wars trilogy.

Sidebar: I drew some interesting parallels between this film and the television show The Sopranos, specifically because of the role that fandom played for some of the characters in concert with how it interacted with the show’s fanbase. The characters are constantly seen watching The Godfather films, and attempting to model their lives after Puzo’s characters, assuming that they are emulating real people. This illusion is somewhat shaken when they visit Italy, only to discover that what they believe to be the basis for their behavior and the reality underpinning it does not resemble their Italian relatives and their daily reality. Even their pronunciation of the Italian slang word for mistress, “cumare” (which, interestingly enough, derives from ‘cumulare’ which means ‘to hold concurrently’) as “goomar” shows that every level of approximation moves them further away from what they are trying to approximate. Their fan-based reality, in an attempt to replicate something, produces a completely different result.

Though much maligned, the reboot of the original Murray/Ackroyd/Ramis vehicle from the 1980s (which more or less ignores the relatively awful sequel, which made the mistake of attempting to simply repeat everything that everyone liked about the first movie, but with an evil painting and a baby thrown in the mix instead of Gozer the Gozerian) isn’t as intrinsically awful as its critics would have you believe. Many of them believe that it is bad simply by the virtue of corrupting the same nostalgia which it has been playing to.

Disclaimer: Much like the internet trolls who have been saying awful things about this film, I haven’t seen it as of the writing of this post. I’m basing everything I know about it off of the analyses of those who have seen it, the trailer materials which have been available via streaming video services, and basic knowledge of theory.

Besides the obvious nod to Ghostbusters’ fandom through the internal references to the characters existing in the same universe as the original 80s film, there seem to be several formulaic story/plot reproductions from the original film, even down to what appears to be the delayed introduction of the Winston character analogue.

It would be careless to omit the interesting reaction to this film, as it is one of the reasons why I included it in my list of examples. Even though it seems to tick the same basic boxes as the Abrams Star Wars remake/reboot/sequel, it has been experiencing a relatively heretofore unseen level of pushback and vitriol from certain portions of the fan community, ostensibly due to the gender-swapping of the principal characters. Although there has been a fairly high level of gender bias in superhero films, it seemed odd that a simple gender-swap could provoke this level of disdain – especially when essentially every tenet of nostalgia films had been fulfilled.

I attribute this to an uncanny valley effect for nostalgia films – and nostalgia in general. Nostalgia requires some difference from the original property/properties, otherwise it wouldn’t be nostalgia. It additionally requires a level of similarity for the ameliorative effects of familiarity to allow the new property to be assimilated into the typical fan’s internal representation of canon. Overcoming an inherent gender bias may be too much for some; this would result in pushing the new property outside the arbitrary limits of what would be acceptable in the overall epistemology of the larger system and make it seem foreign / repulsive to that segment of the fan population.

Explaining the emergence of the sub-genre

I have a few theories which may explain the increasing popularity and emergence of this particular sub-genre.

I attribute this to a desire for us to be “in on the joke” at all times. One of the central tenet of the new crop of postmodern / post-postmodern film has been a level of awareness, which was a possibility of the genre, but not necessarily a necessity. Films like The Avengers: Age of Ultron spend so much time winking at their audience that you might think they had developed a metaphoric facial tic – yet these are insanely popular films, despite (or perhaps because of) this propensity.

At some point, this self-awareness expanded into the conflation of epistemic systems between the real world and the canon of the series. Much like any other device used in film (think Michael Bay-hem, all credit to Tony Zhou), it can be overused or abused if not allocated thoughtfully – which explains exactly why it has been overused and abused, in my opinion. To ironically paraphrase: “[we] were so preoccupied with whether or not [we] could, [we] didn’t stop to think if [we] should”.

A play for money from the newly cash-heavy generation X.

In much the same way that the Boomers were exploited by large companies in an effort to boost consumption of nostalgia related properties (every Beatles re-release ever made, properties like Bewitched (2005), which, oddly enough, falls into this sub-genre rather nicely, and similar reboots of major franchises from their heyday), there have been moves by major media companies to attempt to consolidate the ownership of seminal childhood memory properties. (This has been made possible largely in part to the loss of the Commons due to the perpetual extension of copyright law.) The most egregious of these allocations, in my estimation, have been made by the Walt Disney Company.

Disney, along with purchasing rights to the wet dreams of thousands of lightsaber-wielding and whip cracking fans with the acquisition of Lucasfilms for the paltry price of nine billion dollars, has been riding nostalgia for their properties for quite some time, including remakes of relatively terrible 1980s movies like Adventures in Babysitting and at least one too many sequels to Toy Story. They’ve also been engaging in “live action reboots” for many of their more notable properties, knowing that the fans of the originals will pour into the theaters, forgiving any and all flaws in their products for the sake of attempting to recapture some lost innocence.

They had an interesting pseudo-entry into this sub-genre with Tomorrowland. Besides being a relatively color-by-number Disney film, it made reference to an older Tomorrowland attraction at one of Disney’s parks, along with a fictional plot about it being a gateway to a future full of invention. This could be seen as a call to nostalgia for Disney’s parks, if not their films.

Lack of faith in new properties.

In an era when studios are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on what my brother used to affectionately refer to as “special effects bananas”, a flop in those budget ranges would be devastating to a major production company. The furthest they seem willing to extend themselves is hiring relatively unknown or indie directors to helm those projects.

Known bankability has been responsible for the vast majority of film sequels and other multi-film properties, and it would be foolish to fault the major studios for trying to recoup their investments by ensuring that a certain amount of their ROI is virtually guaranteed by the participation of an existing fanbase. The larger migration from simple sequels to nostalgia films for them seems to be a relatively predictable move, in that sense.

]]>2016-07-18T15:59:40-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2016/07/18/photography-13-days-of-unusual-shots-with-vintage-glassAs part of a project to force myself to expand my artistic horizons (as well as my technical competence) in the field of photography, I’m forcing myself to try to use one of my vintage manual lenses – without the aid of focus assist or peaking of any sort – to take pictures which are out of my standard comfort zone*, and to get at least one “keeper” shot to exhibit for each day, starting on the Fourth of July. I am updating this post with both copies of the photos, as well as meta-data and links to the originals on Flickr.

* “Out of my standard comfort zone” is a subjective measurement. Hopefully these captures won’t be subjects or framings which I’ve heavily relied upon in the past, but as everything is derivative in _some_ sense, I guarantee nothing.

Day 01 (July 4, 2016)

“The Magic of Smoking”

My friend’s stepfather cooking a rack of ribs on his smoker for the Fourth of July. This was converted to black and white using my gegl c2g process. This image makes heavy use of both a lens which I have neglected over the years (the Vivitar 80-200mm F mount), as well as a large amount of negative space in the center of the frame.

Day 02 (July 5, 2016)

“Maggie in a sliver of light”

Although Maggie is one of my favorite subjects – mainly because of her propensity for staying perfectly still when a camera is pointed at her – this is a relatively unusual picture because it involved a bit of playing around with the available light. One sliver of light fell on Maggie’s head, so I adjusted her to be framed properly and this is the result.

Day 03 (July 6, 2016)

“Bug”

A took a series of photos at night of a swarm of gypsy moths and other interesting insects at the convenience store down the road. I selected this as my “pick of the day” because of the interesting reflection and the use of the Vivitar lens’ macro mode.

Day 05 (July 8, 2016)

“TT”

I put my skittish toy poodle “TT” up on a stool and tried shooting up on her – which I usually can’t do, due to her diminutive size. She’s also difficult to photograph since she tends not to stay still.

Day 06 (July 9, 2016)

“Maggie”

Time after time, I keep coming back to Maggie as a subject. This time, I was playing around with artificial practical light sources (in this case, a bar of halogen lights) combined with extremely wide apertures to try to nail focus by eye.

Day 08 (July 11, 2016)

“Low-angle Maggie”

I usually end up shooting down or at eye level when I take pictures of Maggie – and I usually end up working with small bits of additive light. This time, I put her up high in a flood of light to try to get a usable exposure out of her.

Day 13 (July 16, 2016)

“Match in motion”

Motion and blur are things I generally try to keep to a minimum, so this moving image of me pulling a lit match through the air is generally outside the realm of my comfort zone, even when dealing with fairly long (2+ sec) exposure times.

Conclusion

I tend to favor the 50mm-range lenses – the Asahi Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 and the Nikkor 55mm f/1.2 – but still managed to get some additional use out of a few of my 135mm-range lenses as well as a Vivitar zoom lens with a fascinating macro mode. I’m also much quicker with manual focus adjustments and eyeballing range than before I started the project.

Unfortunately, the biggest issue I ran into was my own procrastination. Knowing that I had to try to pick a single new and interesting photo every day led to me waiting until after dark to try to cram in a quick photo session between 11:30pm and midnight – which is exactly what I shouldn’t have been doing. It’s far better to work at carrying the camera at all times and snapping photos of interest than trying to shoehorn a quick photo in after a long day. This was originally going to be for a month, but after two weeks of realizing that I needed better preparation and a better plan, I left it at thirteen days – and I intend on planning a more effective methodology and trying again.

WARNING: There are some details of the film which may function as spoilers, so don’t read below the fold if you haven’t seen it yet.

Day One: Preproduction, Kickoff, Writing, and Planning

The 48HFP genre rules changed – we were allowed to pull two genres which we were allowed to decide between. We pulled “Comedy” and “Adventure Serial”, from which the writers decided to go with “Comedy”. We lucked out, in that Curtis (our producer) was able to attend the kickoff event, since we had been worried that one of us would have to make the 3+ hour roundtrip to Boston for the pickup.

As per previous 48HFP attempts, our writing team did not discuss anything until the script hand-off. This time around, our producer Curtis sat on the phone while they spit-balled ideas, but otherwise the writing process was more-or-less the same as it had been.

The writers finished the final copy significantly earlier than before, with copies going out to the cast and crew before 11:00pm. Jon Demers and I packed the box truck full of everything that didn’t need to charge.

I made some general shot prep notes, then spent a few minutes discussing it with Natasha (my wife, and one of the writers), then got to sleep after I was certain that everything was charging.

Day Two: Filming

We woke up a little after 6:00am, since we were trying to make a call time of 8:00am in Douglas, MA, where one of our friends had helpfully lent out their lake house for us to use for shooting. I took the production vehicle (our large box truck, colloquially referred to as “Blue” for what can only be considered obvious reasons) and left before the rest of the crew to secure the parking location for the vehicle. I hadn’t properly anticipated the Rhode-Island-level potholes on the road leading there, nor the incredibly low-hanging branches. After a white-knuckle turn-around, I got Blue in place, and the crew ended up trickling in between 8:15 and 8:30 am.

Our producer had planned to have us start shooting around 10:00am to take advantage of the position of the sun. We had originally expected a cloudy / overcast day, but last minute changes in the weather forecast had forced us to put together a scrim to cut shadows. (The scrim was essentially electrical conduit, connectors, a sheet, and some clamps.) We hadn’t accounted for the tree branches in the way of the line of sight between the sun and our actors, so we ended up simply using the cloth component rather than the entire scrim frame. Thankfully very little of the script was written to be outside.

Inside we realized that, due to the number of windows in the house, we would be seeing both a fairly severe variation in light levels over the course of the shooting day and a significant amount of back-lighting, causing our characters’ faces to be lost in shadow. Our lighting designer, Deb, hid two panel lights around corners in the open floor plan (and in once case used a room-dividing muslin curtain to form an impromptu soft-box), and rigged up a key light on a C stand to bring around for medium and tighter shots. For the majority of shots, neither video village (located in the kitchen, and connected by a long SDI cable which had been Frankensteined together from several shorter SDI cables), nor any non-practical lights were visible for the majority of our shots.

A few shots, due to lighting, bumped up against the 180-degree line. We may have been able to fix this with a little additional planning for shot/reverse-shot, although it’s very difficult when all sides of a table are being shot around hidden lighting augmentation. Rather than bore any potential readers with the tedium of standard shot setup, I’m going to detail the two “more difficult” shots we executed.

One was a “That 70s Show” style spinning shot, which we executed by collapsing a tripod down, spring clamping it to a table at head level, and clamping a key light to the top of the top handle of the camera rig. This had the annoying effect of mismatching coloring for the entire shot, which we made a mental note to correct in color correction/grading.

The other specialty shot was our last shot, which was supposed to be a god’s eye view shot of four people pushing back from a table. Due to the ceiling height and lens length, the crop makes it a little funny. We ended up having to break the camera down, mount it on the end of a C stand arm, and jack the camera all the way to the ceiling. Even with an 11mm focal length, we couldn’t capture everyone, and the crop is a little … funny. The takeaway for me was: either know your location, your gear, or make a more educated guess.

Another recurring issue we had was the boom mic shockmount misbehaving for our indoor shots. We have a homemade blimp / zeppelin for outdoor shots, but our standard boom mic shockmount, which is much smaller and better suited for inside work, had some issues with stressed rubber bands. This ended up causing some “bumping” noises periodically when the mic was swung from side to side.

We left the location in Massachusetts around 5:20pm and arrived back at the editing station for 6:00pm. I started the footage offloading and, as is my wont, headed out to grab a cup of coffee. Everything had loaded onto the editing deck by 7:00pm, and we started the edit.

It took us roughly four hours, including some breaks for lunch, to get everything edited and the basic sound replacement done. The major issue we ran into involved two takes which didn’t capture properly – both of which covered the establishing shots of the beautiful lake we had shot on. This was due to us not setting up video village or an EVF outside for those shots in order to attempt to save time. It was a hard lesson, but we re-worked the intro concept to get around the lack of footage.

Nick and I sat up getting the credits done (which we usually leave until morning for 48 hour festivals) and doing a basic round of coloring. There were only two shots/angles which provided a fair amount of difficulty: one was a heavily backlit shot of one of the actors (which couldn’t be avoided, due to the round-table setup we had used) and the other was due to some augmented lighting we had used for our rotating shot – everything else had been pre-matched. We also had used an IR cut filter (for the first time), which provided the cleanest and most color-accurate footage I’ve gotten on the BMPC4K body yet. I got the OMF and reference video off to our sound post crew by 3:30pm and fell asleep on the couch near the editing cave.

Day Three: Post-Production and Dropoff

We woke up at 8:00am. This is only notable because we never sleep in until 8:00am during one of these – but the initial round of coloring being done the night before with the credits afforded us some extra breathing room. After another cup of coffee (naturally), I got to work on the second round of coloring.

We ended up round-tripping the post-production audio a total of four times. This had less to do with the new engineer we were working with (who was awesome, by the way), but had more to do with a number of boom microphone clanking issues we had noticed. We also took the opportunity to insert some non-diegetic sounds, as we were going for a more comedic end product.

Post-Mortem Analysis

I need to attach my script to me so it doesn’t get lost. - Every time I put my shooting script down, I couldn’t find it, and would have to waste time looking for it.

Separate shot list, rather than marking on script (skipped this time to cut down shot prep time). - My separate shot lists are generally very beneficial for the 1st AD, but I had foregone that process in order to cut down shot prep time. This, in retrospect, was a mistake.

For outdoor shots: be extremely mindful of the sun. - When filming outdoors in the morning or afternoon, the angle of the sun changes rather dramatically over the course of ten or fifteen minutes. If you’re using a scrim (as we were) to attempt to blunt the hard light given off by the sun, make sure it’s adjustable. We ran into problems when it became apparent that there was no maneuvering room around tree branches and bushes, and each successive take involved resetting the positioning of the scrim. It felt like it took more time to do those shots than it did to film the complicated ones we had scripted.

The EVF needs to be plugged into camera power source. - I took care of this as soon as we recovered from the 48. It was an annoyingly expensive adapter cable, but was entirely worth it.

Subject matter. - We didn’t win anything this time around; not even an audience award (that went to a drama which screened before us). I attribute some of that to the intentionally offensive subject matter. If we were trying specifically to win a 48, that probably wasn’t the wisest of directions to proceed in.

]]>2016-04-07T17:30:23-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2016/04/07/exploiting-flaws-in-vintage-glassModern lenses (glass) have been manufactured in an increasingly flawless way, attempting to achieve optical perfection. I’d like to delve into the potential of using older “vintage” glass specifically to exploit the inherent imperfections present in those lenses.

An initial note: this isn’t for the faint of heart or those who tend to rely on automatic features on their cameras – it requires a slightly more in-depth knowledge of camera settings and shouldn’t be embarked upon lightly.

Traditional uses of vintage glass

Vintage glass used to be strictly the province of those with vintage cameras, but thanks to the efforts of people like DP Shane Hurlbut, ASC, they are seeing a renaissance in digital cinematography – as well as in some still photography circles.

Flaws – or rather, ‘character’

Most vintage lenses are considered “less perfect” than modern lenses, thanks to the chromatic aberrations, flaring, and other effects which show up in images due to the older processes used to create these lenses.

For example, a modern Zeiss (or even Rokinon/Samyang) lens will produce a relatively sharp image from corner to corner when stopped down a very slight amount, compared to older lenses, most of which were known for edge softness, vignetting, and especially chromatic aberration.

There are reasons to overlook some of these “flaws” – one of the most compelling being “micro-contrast”. Another reason (and one of my personal favorites) is using the “flaws” of a lens as a tool. The internet is littered with images of people exploiting “swirly bokeh”, but my personal favorite is the pseudo-painting effect from a certain vintage 55mm f/1.2 F mount lens.

Disadvantages and caveats

Using these less expensive older lenses does have a few caveats / drawbacks. Some of the ones which have bitten me are:

They require adapters. For the most part, older lens systems will require different mounts, which will necessitate the purchase of adapters. All lens adapters are not equal, so great care must be exercised in purchasing adapters which will not damage your camera or lens, or make your shooting life harder in any way.

Potential issues when working with shorter FFD lenses/systems. Focal flange distance is very important to consider when attempting to use lenses which were not intended for your camera’s mounting system. If the FFD of the lenses is designed to be shorter than your camera’s FFD (for example, attempting to use a Canon FD lens on a Nikon or Canon EF mount), it may require corrective glass.

Sensor coverage issues. Some lenses were designed for smaller film/sensor planes than many of today’s DSLR cameras offer. This will produce a vignetting effect or will actually show the inside of the lens barrel on the final image.

Requires manual focus (photography). Most vintage lenses are not compatible with newer AF systems, so you’ll have to set your still camera to full manual mode. (This is something you probably would eventually be doing, but it’s important to note that some familiarity with manual mode is good.) Some cameras and adapters will allow Av and Tv priority modes to still function if they allow metering, so you may not have to use full manual settings on your camera – but best to prepare.

Rising costs due to renewed interest in Cinematography. After Shane Hurlbut’s initial coverage of using older lenses for newer bodies, the costs of vintage lenses have gone through the roof, including some which have increased in cost (due to demand) by at least an order of magnitude.

Some example lenses

M42 - Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4. This lens has very nice “blooming” highlights, and tends to look “dreamy” when shooting wide open. Stopped down it tends to produce very sharp images.

F mount - Nikkor 55mm f/1.2. An “imperfect” piece of glass which produces almost surreal images when shooting wide open at f/1.2. Much of the Ken Rockwell review is centered around how this lens produces odd bokeh, lower contrast, etc – but those qualities help produce very unique looking images.

M42 - Helios 44-2 85mm f/2.0. I still haven’t managed to find one of these for much under $500, but it’s one of the most “popular” vintage lenses for producing odd effects. Its “swirly bokeh” is one of the reasons why it is so sought-after.

]]>2016-03-05T09:53:11-05:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2016/03/05/downton-abbey-camera-stabilization-as-a-storytelling-toolThe acclaimed BBC/PBS Masterpiece Theater series Downton Abbey has been lauded for its period-accurate settings and for a heretofore unseen look at the non-affluent parts of historical life around the English aristocracy. I’d like to look at Downton Abbey’s use of camera stabilization as an effective storytelling tool.

As Above, So Below

As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul” - Hermes Trismegistus

It’s quite telling that even the now-iconic Downton Abbey logo mirrors one of the fundamental concepts behind the show.

That which is seen to occur in the “upper” house (the aristocracy) is mirrored in the “lower” house (the servants / plebeians) in almost every aspect between acrimony and matrimony. The upper house has a very strict system of rules which is seen in the lower house, but there is a veneer of formality which is, at least in the culture of the time, necessitated by the weight of their class.

Rigid culture

As soon as we visit the upper house, replete with all of its pomp and rigid cultural mores, we see a very specific set of visual rules which are reflected in the camera’s positioning, framing, and stabilization.

There is a preponderance of very tightly framed shots in social settings, with the characters appearing boxed in.

It’s a pretty stunning visual metaphor for the iron shackles of social convention; the characters are almost unable to move or shift in any meaningful way even though they are surrounded by the finest items and foods that their times have to offer.

Even in a theoretically open space, they are cluttered and packed into a small area, metaphorically (as well as physically) unable to move outside of the limited boundaries they are given in the space of their gilded cages. (Note that the servants, though standing at rigid attention, are otherwise completely unfettered by these boundaries in the frame.)

In accordance with this framing, the same rigidity is applied to the motion of the camera. The scenes of the aristocracy, whether in their dressing areas or in the main rooms, are almost always locked off – and when they are not, they only use the smoothest of steadicam or gib motions to convey the movement of their characters.

… versus commoners

The images of the servants tell a much different story. Consider a very similar setting to the meals of the aristocracy:

Even though the room is far less glamorous, the spacing between characters equally as tight, and characters serving (in much the same way), there is an immediate difference apparent in the frame. Characters are shown to have a bit of negative space around them, and no props are seen to block views of their faces, as the candelabras do for the aristocracy.

Continuing on with this contrasting comparison, we can see that the vast majority of all scenes of the “lower” house are shot with little to no significant stabilization; it seems to have been captured using either over-the-shoulder or handheld camera stabilization. Rather than attempting to convey a lack of balance or deficiency in the servants, the camera work seems to lend itself to showing a more casual atmosphere – a lack of the same rigid formality (at least, not to the same degree) that we see surrounding the aristocracy.

Subconsciously we are aware that the rigidity of the class structure and all of its associated confining baggage is not as present in these shots and scenes.

Conclusion

“As above, so below”, as a concept, applies not just to the difference between the aristocracy and the servants in Downton Abbey, but also to the methodology of the filming in the epistemological meta-layer which is formed by the framing, motion, and stabilization of the camera.

(All images are presented under fair use guidelines – all frame grabs are property of Carnival Film & Television, Masterpiece Theatre, or any other entities who hold copyright on this film. They are presented for exclusively educational purposes.)

]]>2016-02-08T15:37:08-05:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2016/02/08/opensource-contact-sheets-for-photographersOne of the disadvantages to being a pretty active photographer is trying to handle archiving old shoots and being able to quickly locate a certain shot amongst thousands of directories of RAW stills, which may not be present on your local media. Enter the humble contact sheet.

Stretching all the way back to the days of Ansel Adams, the contact sheet has provided a simple way to view large numbers of prints at a glance. With the introduction of digital photography, software packages like Picasa (and iPhoto, for the followers of the Cult of the Bitten Fruit), have enabled large numbers of photos to be viewed at a glance – however, they have the downside of needing the actual photos to be readily accessible (to one degree or another).

My hack is Linux-based, although it will work on any platform supporting bash, dcraw, and ImageMagick’s montage (along with xargs, printf, and a bunch of other bash extensions). It has the additional advantage of being able to resume from whenever it is stopped without losing or repeating work. I wrote it to support my layout, which involves a single directory full of timestamped unique directory names – but it should work as long as the directory names are unique, regardless of the structure.

]]>2015-11-19T08:00:47-05:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/11/19/why-gotham-succeeds-where-other-prequels-failI have been known to outwardly hate prequel films. This is, in no small part, due to them tending to be terrible. It should come as little shock that I was extremely reticent about watching Gotham, DC’s attempt at a prequel story for the Batman franchise. As I have defended in past, the Batman origin story is the greatest origin story in film, and attempting to undertake it in a way which would not result in extreme disappointment for aficionados of the canon seemed dodgy, at best.

I was very, very wrong – and I’d like to examine why.

Why Prequels Usually Suck

Prequels generally tend to suck out loud – but why? It seems as though the origin of anything would occupy a treasured place in a film epistemology.

Origin stories are usually already told. Turns out that virtually every Spiderman film franchise has burnt hours of our lives showing us the exact same origin story. Although the trope is periodically subverted (Batman (1989), at least one Hulk film), we usually have seen the origins of our favorite characters to one degree or another.

Predestination and foregone conclusions: reverse engineering stories. When the conclusion is canon, it may be tempting for a screenwriter to “reverse engineer” their plot based on that conclusion. This leads to the concept that certain things have to happen because they have already happened. (If this seems oddly circuitous, it’s probably just bad phrasing on my part.) This doesn’t only infect/affect prequels, but also retconning existing universes – like Spock and Kirk’s unlikely friendship in J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars audition reel or Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor’s preordained sexual escapades in Terminator: Genisys. The Star Wars Prequilogy (yeah, I port-manteau’d that – so what?) is especially guilty of this, having presented insanely unbelievable scenarios because … destiny.

Destroying beloved canon. There’s a fine line between homage and blasphemy when it comes to canon – and it’s not always necessarily discernible at first glance. As Noel Murray pointed out in The problem with prequels, they tend to trade on the totemic and are “comfortingly familiar”; this can function to distance, rather than embrace, fandom when a prequel installment changes some pillar of a film canon’s epistemological system. (A simple example is how Abrams, over the course of two prequel films, manages to remove the need for starships by allowing trans-warp teleportation and magic Lazarus-style resurrections with MacGuffin blood.)

We don’t need to know everything. A serious criticism I’ve had regarding many modern film and television properties is that they don’t leave anything to the imagination. To pick on the Prequilogy for a moment (and who doesn’t love to do that), no one really cared that midichlorians make you one of the Elites in your universe, or that Darth Vader was apparently the product of a virgin birth. Those things weaken the canon, point out horrific plot holes, and aren’t anywhere nearly as impressive as whatever your imagination could have come up with. In the same way that the disemboweling scene in “Braveheart” is so disturbing because you can only see Wallace’s reactions to the horrors he’s suffering, leaving things to the imagination is paramount in creating an immersive film universe which stands up on its own.

Gotham’s Success

Gotham seems to succeed where others fail because it’s not a prequel, or, at least, not strictly one. The events in its arcs take place before most of the canonical Batman mythos, but it isn’t a prequel of any of the existing Batman canons. It introduces characters which break any sort of canonical consistency with the Burton/Schumacher and Nolan arcs, but we’re perfectly fine with it, as it doesn’t pretend to attempt to achieve epistemological consistency.

There is an overarching character arc which forms the core of the Batman mythos, and it has been adhered to by the Bruno Heller and the rest of the writing staff of Gotham.

They also don’t have The Batman in season one. At all.

You get to see Young Master Bruce stumble and plod his way into becoming a great detective (remember, that’s what The Batman does in between kicking the crap out of baddies) at the same time you see the antithetical fall of Gotham into the state where it needs The Batman. (I’d love to take credit for this part of the argument, but I owe huge chunks of it to SEK.)

It’s worth pointing out that Heller also leaves out the yang to Batman’s ying, The Joker, in the first season. My supposition is that we’re going to see something that we never saw in Nolan’s treatment of The Joker: a backstory. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, at the moment. In the same way that the Batman canon relies very heavily on there being a very solid backstory for The Batman, the origins of The Joker are exceptionally fluid and ill-defined. It could be said that, in some meta-context, that part of The Joker’s canon exists in an orthagonal orientation to The Batman because the characters are such specific polar opposites.

In the end, Gotham is what a prequel is supposed to be: setting the stage for something larger, not rehashing known canon with new actors.

]]>2015-09-06T17:23:19-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/09/06/layers-of-canon-and-the-batmanOne of the concepts which has been intriguing me over the last few weeks has been the concept of multiple layers of canon existing over many works in an overarching canon.

The Batman mythos comprises more than 70 years of collective canon built on a foundation of comics, films, television series, and other works of fiction; as it spans multiple mediums and auteurs, it seems an ideal system to examine for the phenomenon of nested canon.

Canon

In fiction, canon is the material accepted as officially part of the story in an individual universe of that story. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction. The alternative terms mythology,timeline, and continuity are often used, with the former being especially to refer to a richly detailed fictional canon requiring a large degree of suspension of disbelief (e.g. an entire imaginary world and history), while the latter two typically refer to a single arc where all events are directly connected chronologically.

From this definition, we can separate works which exist within the same basic epistemological system as being either canon or apocrypha, based on whether or not the works conform to certain rules and assumptions which we have about the nature of that system.

When dealing with a very old, very complex canon like the mythos of The Batman, we begin to see another pattern emerge: that of a layered or nested canon. For the sake of brevity, I will be focusing mostly on the film and television canonical works associated with The Batman, and intentionally omitting the majority of the myriad comic / graphic novel works involved.

Layer 1 : The Mythos of The Batman

The outermost layer of canon would be the overarching mythos of The Batman. There are several generalizations which we can make about the central character which associate him with this canon:

Privileged. Bruce Wayne comes from wealth, which is necessary for his crime fighting accoutrement.

Vigilante crime fighter. The Batman fights injustice and crime, with or without the explicit support of sanctioned law enforcement. Some sub-canons have omitted the vigilantism (the 1960s television show insisted on explicitly indicating that Batman was a sanctioned law enforcement officer to avoid morality codes), but still keeps the majority of the trope.

Dead parents. The raison d’être for Wayne’s transformation into The Batman is the tragic loss of his parents, leaving him an orphan.

Secret identity. Bruce Wayne is The Batman, and the duality existing between the ostentatious playboy and the elusive crimefighter is an essential part of his mythology.

Caretaker. Alfred (or a similar suitable caretaker) has to help Wayne manage his double life.

Layer 2 : Series

In film and TV, the major series divisions of Batman can be summarized by the following:

1960s Batman (Written by Lorenzo Semple, Jr). Featured a very campy Batman, played by Adam West, and introduced the Batman angle.

1980s-1990s Tim Burton “reboot” (4 film series, Directed by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher). These films, particularly the 1989 Burton film, were responsible for the dark, gothic, post-modern Batman lens through which all subsequent adaptations have been viewed – and also for the utter nadir of any Batman film franchise to date in the offal offering of Batman & Robin.

1990s Batman : The Animated Series (Warner Brothers Animation). Featured a darker version of The Batman than the Adam West adaptation, led by the voice talents of Kevin Conroy as The Batman and Mark Hamill as The Joker.

2000s Nolan “reboot” / Dark Knight Trilogy (3 film series). This series has the interesting distinction of being the only one to have remained under the control of a single auteur (Christopher Nolan) for its entire run. (It’s also home to the greatest origin film of all time.)

Each of these epistemological sets contain one or more directors/writers, and span a number of works, but have a certain level of in-universe canon and trope which they share. The tone and camp of the 1960s Batman series, for example, is shared amongst all the works within that domain – as well as a certain amount of in-universe continuity.

Layer 3 : Auteur

Each director has their own series of rules and tropes for The Batman, independent of the miniature arc which comprises the series. (The aforementioned exception is, of course, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, as the series is comprised of only a single auteur’s work.)

Schumacher, for example, seemed to be all about Lorenzo Semple-ing every moment of every film – which was true to the canon established by the 1960s Batman adaptation, but not the canon established by Batman and Batman Returns. To further complicate matters, several actors reprised their roles, making it even more difficult to differentiate between the first and second half of the four film series.

Each auteur’s vision for the characters and canon of the individual series can be taken as a miniature canon, replete with all of the epistemological baggage which that entails. Michael Keaton’s Batman can be seen as a single character undergoing multiple storylines over the course of Batman and Batman Begins. He’s surrounded by some of the same supporting cast (Gough and Hinkle), even though the majority of the characters are particular to each storyline. In-universe jokes and references are made, and those two films (in particular) can be seen as forming a strong canonical universe.

Layer 4 : Individual Work

The most atomic level of canon could be said to be a set of rules which only governs the epistemological system represented by the film and any inner subsets of that system – including flashbacks, layered film, and any in-film references which don’t necessarily have any canonical connection to the larger canon of the film’s auteur’s work.

This layer is the most difficult to define separately from simple continuity, but I feel that it can be best represented as the series of rules which a film creates for its outermost epistemological system. If The Batman can jump from building to building in the film in question, he shouldn’t be not able to do so without some sort of explanation. This consistency allows us to maintain our suspension of disbelief when consuming a film work.

Summary

Understanding the different types of canon which can coexist in an epistemological canon as complicated and old as that of The Batman should allow a greater level of enjoyment and understanding of those works by allowing us to see each of these individual canonical layers and separately consume in-universe elements without having to worry about the inevitable paradoxes and inconsistencies which will eventually arise in a system as complicated as the history of The Batman.

]]>2015-08-28T10:27:46-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/08/28/the-monomyth-saving-the-cat-and-consistencyJoseph Campbell’s book “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” wasn’t intended to be a blueprint to create stories or films, but it has become that for many auteurs. Why the Monomyth?

The Monomyth

Joseph Campbell outlined a number of common archetypal points, which he believed comprised the common points from a number of mythological sources. He called it the “monomyth” (a reference to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake). He summarized it as:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell broke the concept into seventeen stages, which could be divided into the three act structure most commonly found in film and theater: Separation, Initiation, and Return.

The monomyth concept became incredibly pervasive, influencing such properties as Star Wars (where creator George Lucas expressly indicated that he had used Campbell’s work as a reference), Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, and being subverted by Frank Herbert’s Dune (although eerily partially un-subverted by the Lynch film adaptation thereof).

Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat” and the age of lazy screenwriting

In the late 1980s, a successful “spec” screenwriter, Blake Snyder, adapted the monomyth concept into a “beat sheet” template for aspiring screenwriters. His title was a reference to the emotional investment an audience takes in a character when they witness that character perform a heroic act – specifically Ripley saving a cat named “Jones” in Alien.

Salty, Sweet, and Fatty

There is a pretty strong theory in the scientific community that our predilection for salty, sweet, and fatty foods is an outgrowth of our evolutionary survival needs, since food availability pre-agricultural-revolution was not necessarily guaranteed in most populations. This seems like an utterly harmless observation, until it is coupled with shareholder expectations for unbounded profits in the food industry. We end up with a push to create food-like substances which push certain evolutionary triggers in our physiology, causing us to be drawn towards them – eventually creating an arms race to create the most attractive food-like substance to create the highest level of profit for the company producing those substances.

Pushing buttons and the race to the bottom

The Campbellian Monomyth, as well as instructive derivatives like Save the Cat, offer a satisfying story which pushes all of the right buttons so that we will eventually make the “correct” consumer choices – watching their films, reading their books, and ultimately holding up their bottom line.

The story about bad behavior in systems to which I tend to refer is The Parable of the Tribes, in which the behavior of those in a system is dictated by the worst in that system. It describes the “race to the bottom” in US State-level regulations for businesses, and also describes the behavior of self-interested entities producing films. If you know that pushing an evolutionarily-defined button is going to produce additional profit, you’re not going to let your competitor have that advantage. The same effect can be seen in the teal and orange color grading epidemic in the last decade or so.

Everything has its place

At first glance, it’s easy to read all of this as building towards a dismissal of any piece centering around the monomyth; nothing could be further from the truth.

I have been wrestling with the concept that things have their place, and that even if I personally don’t particularly care for them, other people might find some use or satisfaction related to them.

The monomyth and its formulaic corollaries aren’t specifically instructions for creating pablum, but rather a description for archetypal stories which predate our current civilizations – what could be considered a safe, tried-and-true description of how to properly tell a compelling story which will enrapture the majority of its audience.

Not every theater-going experience has to be a series of mental calisthenics, although I will admit that delving into film analysis and theory has ruined some of the surprise and awe for me – much in the same way that any sense of wonder or amazement can be dulled by a comprehensive understanding of the less-than-supernatural nature of things. (This is actually one of the reasons why I prefer that stories not engage in annoyingly comprehensive epistemological completion in their respective knowledge systems, since my imagination tends to be more interesting than most rote knowledge completions – but I digress.)

Sometimes, you have to be able to go somewhere and turn off your brain for a bit and enjoy something that feels good, even if it is derivative, or overplayed, or just plain guilty indulgence. In this aspect, the film properties heavily derived from Save the Cat (or even the monomyth directly) can be seen as having their place.

]]>2015-08-26T22:51:03-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/08/26/review-ace-jackson-is-a-dead-manAce Jackson is a Dead Man, which I was recently asked to review, is an interesting experiment in contrasts and seems to offer a takeoff on traditional blaxploitation films; there remain questions, however, revolving around how it was executed.

Satire, Parody, or Pastiche?

Although the distinction is made fewer times as the years go on, there are distinct differences between satire, parody, and pastiche. Satire generally tends to involve attacking folly and vice, while pastiche lovingly pokes fun at aspects of genre tropes, and parody is effectively a simple “spoof”.

This film seems to teeter on the brink of satire and pastiche, by my estimation. The filmmaker attempts to iterate societal grievances in stark contrast to the immoral (and very reprehensible) actions of its protagonist; it also espouses the same sentiments by having the protagonist – the eponymous Ace Jackson – rob ostensibly middle-class domiciles and establishments wearing a rubber Ronald Reagan mask.

The climax of the film in the third act concludes with one of my favorite thematic devices, by having Baxter tell an “inner story mirrors outer story” anecdote before killing Ace by shooting him in the back of the head.

The other attempt at “inner story mirrors outer story” does not work quite as well, which I will explain later.

Ace Jackson is a Terrible Man

I don’t mind the trappings of blaxploitation characters and tropes, but there is a certain level of plot arc which characters need to traverse in the course of a film. Ace Jackson starts out as a sniveling terrible man, then proceeds to show himself to be a terrible man (intermittently sniveling when confronted with his own demise) throughout the film. At no point do I feel as though the character has grown in any way, nor do I feel any sort of sympathy for his completely self-imposed fate.

Technical Foibles and Merits

The low-budget nature of the film lends itself to a very interesting parallel – that of the film medium reflecting the inner conflict. The almost-posterized black and white cinematography indicates the way that the titular character views the world – there is nothing but black and white to him.

I did notice some sound issues, and the film could have benefited from some ADR or additional sound post-processing. The jazz-heavy soundtrack formed a pleasant counterpoint to the horrifying level of genre trope sexism, violence, and overall nihilism present in Ace.

The film vacillates between fairly static shots and cinéma vérité style handheld camera movement. Most of the time, this is tied more or less to the content of the film in keeping with blaxploitation tropes, and it seems to have a fairly long average shot length for most of the non-graphic sections of the film. It intercuts graphic photos of dead bodies during dialogue which appear whenever the subject matter turns to mortality.

NOTE: There is also a very high level of supposedly un-simulated sexual acts in the film. If you’re not interested in seeing this, you may have to skip the film altogether, as every female character who appears on screen engages in some sort of sexual congress with the titular character (including one who has cocaine snorted off of/out of her rear end).

Conclusion

The fundamental issue that I had with Ace Jackson is a Dead Man is that Ace just isn’t a likable character, nor does he have a particularly present plot arc. He’s a terrible person at the beginning, and he doesn’t get better or worse as the film progresses. (He’s only slightly relatable when he’s being yelled at by his drug dealer boss, “Bigelow”, in the first few minutes.)

I could buy into the idea that Ace is a product of his circumstances – which the interstitial crawls seem to indicate – if he had any redeemable qualities obviously present in his personality. Empire (which owed much to Carlito’s Way) explained this through expository dialogue, where another character points out that what we end up being is mostly luck of birth – that a drug dealer could have been a stock broker if he had been born in a different place. I never quite get that sense about Ace Jackson.

]]>2015-08-22T11:28:09-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/08/22/the-usual-suspects-mirroring-the-outer-storyOne of my favorite thematic plot devices in the medium of film has been “inner story mirrors outer story” (especially across epistemic layers). Bryan Singer’s 1995 neo-noir classic The Usual Suspects is told through a series of flashbacks – and manages to use this thematic device to great advantage.

WARNING: There be spoilers here. If you’re one of the small group of people who haven’t actually watched The Usual Suspects yet, go watch it, then read on. Seriously. Don’t spoil this for yourself.

Much in the same way that other neo-noir films, like David Fincher’s Fight Club, have done, The Usual Suspects relies very heavily on the narrative fallacy implied by a narrator who takes the role of a liar. There are many sequences which could be examined in this film, but I’d like to pay attention to one in particular.

Agent Kujan has just finished “breaking” Verbal Kint, and has forced him to confront the realization that he has been played from the very start by the criminal mastermind Dean Keaton:

Except that’s not what happened. Kujan falls victim to the narrative fallacy brought on by the “facts” presented to him by an unreliable narrator: Verbal.

Verbal walks out of the room, and Kujan goes back to sipping his coffee and engaging in smalltalk with Jeff Rabin. We’re presented with a medium shot of Kujan, drawing in very slightly as he drinks his coffee.

The reverse shot reveals something that we’ve paid little to no attention to throughout the course of the entire interrogation sequence – primarily because the limited depth of field presented by the DP hasn’t allowed us to see what Verbal is seeing. We’re preoccupied with his story, much like Agent Kujan is. Now, we see the forest through the trees:

We reverse to a much closer shot of Kujan, still drawing in slowly. We have to get into his head so that we can identify with the realization he’s in the process of having:

… and we reverse to a much closer version of the reverse shot. There are a lot of pieces of information on that corkboard, but Kujan is focusing on the label, with a very particular piece of information on it.

Reverse back to Kujan, who is now unhearing everything Verbal just told him over the course of the film:

Now we begin the interesting part of the sequence; Kujan is so startled that he drops his coffee cup. It simply slips out of his fingers (much as Verbal, who he practically had in the palm of his hand, just did mere moments ago):

Angle #1:

Angle #2:

Angle #3:

Denouement:

We experienced the coffee cup dropping to the floor from three different observational points – and the cup shattered completely differently each time. Even though the effective outcome was the same (the cup is broken, there’s liquid on the floor), what actually happened was completely different, based on our observational viewpoint. This is realized through the discontinuous editing which Singer uses to emphasize the disparate nature of the angles we’re seeing of the event in question.

It is essentially a microcosm for the idea that the point of view with which a story is presented completely shapes our perception of that story. We fell victim to the same narrative fallacy as Agent Kujan, as we attempted to stitch together facts and images from a story told by an unreliable narrator – and most of us were taken in by the same “premature enlightenment” as Kujan.

(All images are presented under fair use guidelines – all frame grabs are property of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Spelling Films International, Blue Parrot, Bad Hat Harry Productions, Rosco Film GmbH, or any other entities who hold copyright on this film. They are presented for exclusively educational purposes.)

“The ability to generate novel, high variance outcomes is based on the availability of ideas. Idea availability can be constrained by local search, in which a limited set of options is considered according to confidently held beliefs. Broader search results in more idea variety and can identify ways to combine knowledge that challenge the belief that constrain innovative behavior. The paradox is that innovative experts also search locally to determine what rules to break, while nonexperts search locally and conform to those rules.” - Taylor, Greve (DOI: 10.2307/20159795)

The concept of story and character crossover/mashup to mix epistemological systems between comic, literary, and film universes is hardly a new phenomenon, but there has been a precipitous rise in its prevalence in popular culture over the past decade; I’m looking to explore the reasons behind the increase in popularity.

A Brief History of Crossover/Mashup in Comics

The first comic crossover between comic universes was in 1940/1941 in All Star Comics #3, featuring the creation of the “Justice Society of America”. The separate universes of All-American Publications and National Periodical Publications were not separate for long, however, as they were merged to form the modern day DC Comics company, best known for its Superman and Batman franchises.

If we ignore the overtures of companies attempting to potentially consolidate their holdings, the first official inter-company crossover would have been Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man in 1976. This was the first crossover/mashup of the two largest comic book companies, DC and Marvel.

Since then, there have been a significant number of crossover comics which have bridged the gaps between epistemic comic systems, including a number of unusual pairings, such as Archie vs Predator and Star Trek / Green Lantern, as well as comics containing “re-imagined” versions of characters from other systems, such as Dave Sim’s Cerebus, which included variations on characters as varied as Oscar Wilde and Groucho Marx, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, serving as a pastiche of influences such as Daredevil, Ronin, and the aforementioned Cerebus. Whereas these aren’t crossover/mashup comics in the strictest sense of the terminology, they display the same willingness to juxtapose concepts and characters in order to create new and interesting scenarios for their readers.

Fan Fiction: The Internet Modernizes Crossover/Mashup

“There’s no way to stop people from interacting with your content. You can ignore or embrace it … to complain about it isn’t going to make it better. Fan fiction makes up 33 percent of all content revolving around books [on the web].” - Bill Tancer

Since 1998, FanFiction.net has risen to boast over two million users and many times that number of fan-generated fiction pieces. It has effectively helped to spearhead the democratization of fan-centric original content, and had been described as “the adult version of when kids play at being TV characters” by one of its contributors. Oddly enough, in stark contrast to the majority of the fan-centric internet and gaming community, FF.net contributors are self-reported as about 80% female, 20% male.

The rise of a public forum for sharing crossover/mashup ideas has helped normalize the concept to the larger community of internet users, and by extent, the population as a whole.

Modern Film Mashup

The first mashup/crossover film to bridge two companies’ epistemologies was King Kong vs Godzilla in 1962, but one of the first extremely notable crossovers was Warner Brothers’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988 – which managed to secure appearances from leading Disney characters by giving them precise screen time parity with WB’s stars – down to the frame. This level of attention to detail regarding character properties goes to show the delicate nature of inter-company crossover in film, and explains why modern films generally tend to avoid this sort of crossover, giving more attention to either legacy characers which pre-date modern copyright (such as the atrocious film adaptation of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, featuring Jekyll/Hyde, Dorian Gray, Captain Nemo, and other fictional characters), epistemological re-imaginings of existing characters within a particular idiom (any of the Lego versions of popular franchises, such as The Lego Batman Movie or Lego Star Wars: Droid Tales), or intracompany mashups (such as the apparently endlessly popular Marvel Avengers series – or any of Marvel’s seemingly infinite crossovers and guest appearances across multiple mediums).

It should be worth noting that a fair amount of film medium mashup/crossover has taken place in animated films, ostensibly because it is much easier to substitute or secure voice actors than physical actors for their films, as well as the much lower budget associated with those films (which would make the potential risk much lower). An example would be the Superman/Batman: Apocalypse animated film, featuring the two characters from the DC universe.

What attracts us to crossover/mashup?

“I find [it] actually fascinating; sort of a grown-up way of playing with Legos, GI Joes, and Transformers at the same time.” - Scott Eric Kaufman

Franchises and company boundaries are the stuff of corporate bylaw and legal entanglement; one cannot simply expect the imagination to bend to the artificial confines in which we entrap an idea, a hero, or a concept. Children seem to be less aware of these artificially imposed boundaries – which can be seen in the way that children play without regard to them.

As we grow older, we learn more about the world as we assimilate more knowledge and gain more experience, and we experience what David Lynch famously referred to as a “narrowing of imagination”. Our ability to experience and imagine becomes crippled – if we allow it to become so. Much the same way that imaginary play survived in Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying and its eventual metamorphosis into cosplay and other such pursuits, a small (but growing) contingency of fans have helped carry the torch of imagination forward into the doldrums of adulthood.

To what can we attribute the rise in popularity of the crossover/mashup?

I’m postulating that the current meteoric rise in the popularity of the crossover/mashup in pop culture is due to a confluence of the following factors:

Rise in 1980s/1990s Nostalgia. It seems as though not a week can go by without a new “reboot” or “reimagining” of a 1980s/1990s property, from the third film franchise reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (itself a pastiche/homage to a number of comic book characters), to Star Trek (whose popularity waned after ST:TNG went off the air), Star Wars, Transformers, and even My Little Pony (which has seen a popular resurgence in the unusual “brony”” hipster movement in addition to its 2010 series reboot). Whatever the particular causes, this cultural obsession with 20-30 year old items has driven a series of high-budget films, television shows, and action figures, and has reintroduced a number of franchises into the public consciousness which had previously faded from view somewhat.

Postmodernism. Our collective obsession with meta-content has never been more prevalent than it is now; this can be illustrated by the rise in popularity of heavily post-modern properties such as Deadpool (who is expecting a blockbuster movie Any Day Now), Fight Club, and television shows like Arrested Development and Community. We want to see characters interact in ways other than that which we would conventionally expect – even if it means having a character turn to look directly at us and question the plausibility of his written circumstances.

Increasing outcome possibilities. If we follow the logical progression of post-modern television, film, comic, and literary content, we can see that our culture seems to grow weary of some of the incessant tropes with which we are bombarded by popular culture. If we know that Spiderman is always going to defeat his adversary, are we watching a film starring him only because we enjoy the spectacle, because the conclusion is a foregone one? Mashing up multiple franchises and characters gives us the opportunity to venture into heretofore uncharted territory. Will Superman defeat The Batman? How would Thor fare against Superman? By expanding the potential possibilities, we’re allowing ourselves to retain some of the wonderment associated with artforms which may have become stale and predictable.

The internet fanfic movement. There are, as of the last time I looked, more than 20 film franchises with more than 1,000 pieces of crossover fanfic on fanfiction.net. This is an enormous amount of creative effort being put out by the various fan communities, and it shows a strong interest in seeing crossover variations of their favorite characters and franchises.

What has been a niche cultural phenomenon has expanded out to reach the general population, and a new generation of children and adolescents are being exposed to the limitless possibilities of recombining concepts, characters, and situations to form new possibilities to help entertain themselves.

Special thanks to Scott Eric Kaufman for his insight and input into this conceptual analysis, and the cover image is copyright Bongo Comics Group, and is used under fair use to illustrate a concept for educational purposes.

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.” - Salman Rushdie

Whether it be for the sake of temporally relevant cultural mores, attempting to refine or “reimagine” an existing work, or for other miscellaneous reasons, the act of changing existing artistic work has extended itself into the artistic medium of film.

This posits that it is destructive to the nature of the medium and the art inherent therein to endorse these kinds of changes.

Art: Technique and Intent

As I had outlined in a previous work on confidence and hubris, art is comprised of both technique, which can be assessed objectively, and intent – which cannot. Film is a technically complicated medium, which can utilize the talents of hundreds of specialized people to produce a single artistic work, presented in a relatively immutable form. The cumulative technical merits of their work is relatively apparent, and can be somewhat deterministically measured and compared to other similar works.

Intent, however, cannot be determined within a vacuum. It is not necessarily apparent what the original intent of a piece was, since we attach our own perceptions and opinions to an artistic work within the framework of the perceived intent with which we consume that piece of artwork.

This means that repeated consumption of the same source material can yield different reactions and interpretations, depending on how different we are when we experience the artwork. To paraphrase a classic quote: “When I re-read a book, it is different because I am different.”

The original intent behind a work cannot change once the artwork has been completed, as it is part of a singular point in time – part of the holistic process of creation. The only intent which could potentially change would be revisionist intent (the artists’ externally represented intent) or perceived intent.

Interpretation Over Time

“Do I read my old fiction? No. Why would I do that? I did the books as well as I could at the time. To go back would be a torment.” - Richard Ford

Part of any work of art is how that piece of art is interpreted over time. This is a collectively-held opinion, for the most part, as artistic works are said to “hold up over time” or not – and many of the most respected works in film genres are gauged partially by their power to transcend the era in which their creative intents were fomented.

A side effect of this potentially shifting interpretation over time is that certain societal conceptions will tend to shift. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is still taught as a seminal film work, even though it glorified racial inequality and the Confederacy, and featured white actors in blackface. It was (and still is) a product of its time, and can only be properly understood within the construct of that time period. Film students do not watch Birth of a Nation expecting a modern version of race relations, but rather to see the birth of cinematic techniques from the formative era of cinema.

We tend to view film through the lens of our own experiences. If we see a derivative work of a film – for example, the Scream series – without having first seen the source material referenced in the derivative work, our understanding will be much different than if we have seen the works in their naturally occurring chronological order. This is one of the reasons why I recommend that those interested in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled watch Sidney Lumet’s Network first. Although Bamboozled does stand by itself as a piece of cinema, consuming Network first allows the viewer to properly understand how Lee used his interpretation of the earlier work to form his film.

Being able to view a work in the context of that which came before it is integral to being able to form a cogent view of a cinematic work in the context of the full body of film works; modifying an earlier film to fit a later morality would change our ability to properly assess the mutations and combinations of concepts and illustrative techniques which form later films.

Examples of Abuse

Beyond censorship, there are several very visible attempts to change past cinema history which have been publicly known, even outside the community of cinephiles.

Ted Turner, a media mogul, took it upon himself in the 1980s to attempt to colorize old films because he felt that he could make a greater profit from the distribution of colorized films than their black and white original prints. This was more or less universally panned as a bad artistic move from such critical figures as the late Roger Ebert, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. The original film stock is as much a part of the idiom of these classic films as the camera angles and actors’ performances which are contained in them; altering such a basic aspect of the films for the sole purpose of extracting greater profit can only be seen as a kind of artistic abuse.

Another example – one better known to many self-fashioned science fiction fans – is that of the Star Wars Special Editions. George Lucas, after having produced a trilogy of science fiction drawing from both the Campbellian monomyth and his favorite director, Akira Kurosawa, went on to produce a number of lackluster properties, including a terrible Christmas special and an even-more terrible movie about Ewoks – then chose to ignore the properties for over a decade. He decided to create a prequel trilogy (which is terrible in comparison to the originals, by most accounts) – but first, he decided to re-release his original trilogy with updated effects, adjusted/added scenes, and at least one universally hated plot adjustment. The original films, despite any technical flaws or lack of modern computer compositing technology, were a product of their time, and tampering with them to adjust them to a more modern interpretation of their meaning pollutes the original pieces of art by distorting their historical context, however slightly.

Conclusion

Art, and by extension film, cannot be created nor consumed in a vacuum. Our ability to see what has come before us is fundamentally important to our ability to both assess what we see and to better understand how to create work in the vein of the creative continuum in which all film auteurs exist.

]]>2015-07-28T13:21:20-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/07/28/pi-using-the-medium-of-film-to-externalize-a-conceptMarshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage famously posited that the way something is presented to us is as important if not more important than the information itself. Darren Aronofsky’s first feature film, Pi, offers an excellent example of an auteur using the physical medium of film to help tell a story, rather than be hindered by it.

When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so when I was six I did…

Generally when the “medium of film” is discussed in an academic context, it refers to the artistic content presented as part of the rapidly-moving celluloid (and more recently, digital) images presented to a viewer. I’d like to take a look at a far more basic aspect of film: the physical film medium.

How We Perceive Film

There are a number of factors in the physical representation of film which we associate with representing film.

Frame Rate: The specific feel of certain amounts of motion blur endemic to the 24p (23.976 frames per second) frame rate means that film shot at differing frame rates generally tends to feel less like a geniune film. For example, The Hobbit was offered at 48p – twice the normal framerate – and many patrons complained about the sets and effects looking cheap.

Aspect Ratio: Different aspect ratios have been used over the years, but each one carries a certain amount of mental baggage, as a single film does not exist in a vacuum, but is instead colored by the experiences of the films we have seen before it.

Film Grain: A picture which is “too clean” will not feel like actual film to us. This is most likely due to familiarity with the medium.

Color: Whether actual color or a black and white representation, the coloring characteristics of film play a great part in how we interpret the film. The entire field of “colorgrading” is devoted to manipulating this.

Tampering with any of these aspects has a drastic – if not immediately perceptible – effect on the way a film is consumed.

Intentional vs Practical Medium Choice

For at least the few decades, black and white film stock has been historically less expensive than color film. This begs the question of whether the choice to film Pi on black and white film was artistic intent or a financial decision for the sake of Aronofsky’s backers.

This article is predicated on the assumption that the choice was artistic, rather than financial, and there are two basic reasons why I believe this to be the case:

1) The stark contrast in the film. Normal black and white film is generally exposed to give the same basic dynamic range as its color counterpart. Aronofsky uses mostly the extremes to tell his story – and this seems to require a certain amount of artistic forethought to execute properly.

2) Comparison to other low-budget films. Primer, arguably one of the most infamous “low budget” films shot on actual film stock, was shot on color stock – even with a total budget of only $7k, dwarfed by Pi’s $60k. Kevin Smith’s seminal slacker classic Clerks was shot for a similarly small amount of money, but chose to trade off color for black and white film stock in order to secure expensive music licensing rights. Reservoir Dogs was also originally filmed in black and white until Harvey Keitel became an angel investor in the film – but its filming also functioned in a far less obviously guerilla way than Pi.

It’s safe to say that Pi’s use of stark-contrast black and white film stock was an intentional artistic decision.

External Story Mirrors Internal Story

Look at the outside …

… versus the inside:

The basic gamut is much the same. Additionally, Max Cohen always comes across as trapped and confined, even when he is in a wide-open space, like sitting on a park bench.

More importantly, everything is black and white. There are few, if any midtones present. I believe that this mirrors the outer story of man vs god/sun/enlightenment/understanding by giving us only two elements: light and dark. The Go game shows also shows us a stark visual representation of two polar opposites, engaged in quiet battle, through its black and white game pieces.

Underlying Thematic Elements and The Story of Icarus

The black/white theme plays out as a series of opposing forces and visual opposites. For example, look at the way that Max Cohen is portrayed when he is arguing with the Hasids:

He has shaved his head, ostensibly as part of his journey toward understanding the source of his omnipresent migraine headaches. His visage dominates the frame, portraying the claustrophobia of being completely surrounded by opponents with dubious motives. The reverse shot is of the Hasids, towering over him:

Even though he is the center of the proceedings, Max is not the center of attention in the reverse shot; all eyes are on the head rabbi. He takes up much less of the frame, and his beard takes up almost the same amount of screen space as Max’s entire head. Hasids believe that a flowing beard is the bridge between theory and practice, and between heart and mind, so it makes sense that Max, who is far removed from their system of thinking – despite his Jewish upbringing – would be shown across from them with no hair on his head (with the exception of his eyebrows, of course).

The story of Icarus, also referenced in Danny Boyle’s sci-fi epic Sunshine, is reflected throughout the film, and Sol even recites the story to Max during their Go game. It is indicative of the larger thematic story of man attempting to understand the divine. Another similar story in the canonical bible (rather than Greek mythology) is of the Tower of Babel, where man attempts to climb to the heights of their god so that they can understand him, but are thwarted by the introduction of many languages.

The Go game also represents both the monochromatic opposing forces at play, but also ends up reinforcing the notion of the mathematical spiral being such an intrinsic concept in everything, as Sol leaves it as a final message to his greatest pupil:

Supporting Thematic Evidence: Nomenclature in Pi

Even the names of the characters in Pi reflect the theme. “Maximillian Cohen”, our protagonist, means “The Greatest Priest” (or some variation thereof), and can also refer to a great saint and martyr. Max is searching for a 216 digit number (which is 6 x 6 x 6, referring to “666” a Christian biblical reference); this number is implied to be something very bad, which a number of characters want to use for a range of purposes.

The opposing force is Sol, the brilliant mathemetician who gave up looking for patterns in Pi. When I first watched Pi, I assumed that his named was spelled “Saul”, meaning “asked for/prayed for” – but it is instead the homophone “Sol”, which means “sun”:

(He is pictured next to his fish, Archimedes.)

If you remember the oft-repeated voiceover:

When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so when I was six I did…

Sol plays the white pieces, Max plays the black pieces. As Sol points out, an infinite number of moves are possible, but as the game progresses, fewer and fewer outcomes remain, until there is only a single outcome.

(All images are presented under fair use guidelines – all frame grabs are property of Harvest Filmworks, Truth and Soul Pictures, Plantain Films, or any other entities who hold copyright on this film. They are presented for exclusively educational purposes.)

]]>2015-07-20T12:11:10-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/07/20/post-mortem-2015-providence-48-hour-film-projectMy 48 Hour Film Project team, Shoot the Moon Films, participated in the first Providence 48 Hour Horror Film Project last year, but had never entered the regular 48 hour festival in Providence, so we decided to give it a shot. This is my critical analysis of the processes used to create “Buck’s Bed & Breakfast” (IMDb).

WARNING: There are some details of the film which may function as spoilers, so don’t read below the fold if you haven’t seen it yet.

Day One: Preproduction, Kickoff, Writing, and Planning

After deciding to participate in the project this year, we collectively decided that we weren’t particularly interested in going the safer route with most of our production decisions. We put much more effort into ensuring good audio (including putting together mic body packs for wide shots – just in case) and lighting. For the first time, we asked for a Best Boy to work with our lighting designer, and gave her much wider latitude on lighting decisions.

Unfortunately, we were unable to work with Aaron, our usual sound wizard, for post-production (he had won the Sound Design award at the 48 Hour Providence Horror Project last year), and the engineer we worked with on The Gift of Fate, Ben, was also unavailable. At what seemed like the eleventh hour, we were able to bring a new audio engineer, Rob, on board. I had never worked with him before (or met him), so there was a bit of apprehension on my part.

The previous 48 hour project we had done in Providence involved me driving out for the pickup event, messaging the writers the information, and driving back. (Anyone familiar with my comments about the poor state of the roads in Rhode Island knows that I’m not a huge fan of driving to Providence.)

Neither our producer, Curtis, nor I live incredibly close to Providence, so we decided to have him do the pickup and message the information to the writers so that I could help with any technical issues they might have had using the collaborative writing software.

We drew “Fish Out of Water” as our genre, and the writers were both very pleased. We tend to end up pulling dramatic genres and put together far more somber productions, even though many of our actors pride themselves on their comedic chops and our writers like writing comedic parts.

After a few minutes, the writers came up with a funny concept and, in a very unusual move, called me out to ask whether or not I thought it was feasible. (I tend to separate myself from the writing process because I don’t want any of my preconceptions or technical assessments to unduly influence the writing.)

“What if they’re all nude?”

I laughed, and told them that we needed buy-in from our actors, obviously, but that I could manage to film something which wouldn’t be obscene or revealing. Even more surprisingly, everyone was “in”.

The writers cranked out the final script in about two hours after they received final confirmation from all of the actors involved. In an act of complete solidarity, they wrote small parts for themselves in the same state of undress because, quote, “We couldn’t ask them to do something we weren’t willing to do.”

A great deal of the blocking couldn’t be done until we had all of the props, since we wouldn’t be able to see what would (or would not) cover all of the areas which would need to be covered, but I stayed up for a few more hours getting scripts printed out, sending out the PDF copy to our actors and crew, and making shot notes. I also took a bit of time and loaded as much equipment as I could, with the exception of the batteries which were charging inside.

I got to sleep by 2 A.M., a new personal best, if I recall correctly.

Day Two: Filming

I got up around 5:50 A.M., and after taking the dogs out, got back to loading the vehicle with all of our remaining equipment. We ended up carpooling up to Shrewsbury to meet Curtis and the non-Connecticut-based actors at the shooting location around 8:15 A.M., since there was an unexpected traffic situation on I-290E which slowed us down. We set up hair and makeup outside in the vehicle, and had the first two scenes dressed and ready to shoot by 10 A.M. – right on time to match our producer’s timeline for the day.

One slight wrinkle which was thrown in was that one of the principal actresses, Arianna Danae, had to leave by 4 P.M. to meet a prior obligation, so we ended up having to reorder the filming sequence to wrap her parts before she had to leave.

We skipped using the gimbal or any extremely complicated rigs for most shots to save on between-shot setup time. The two notable exceptions were the opening shot, which used my trusty Glideshot portable jib, and one drawing back shot, using a rail set and dolly conversion for the tripod.

Additionally, I had purchased a cheap SDI-HDMI converter to allow using an external monitor for the production designer and lighting designer to monitor the diegetic space, but which also came in handy so that multiple people could watch for any, ahem, “unexpected exposure”.

For the most part, I mostly used a 35mm T/1.5 lens, occasionally swapping it out for a 24mm T/1.5 for constrained space or wide shots, an 85mm T/1.5 lens for CU/ECU shots, and a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS lens for depth tracking. I tried to stay with the 35mm lens to stay away from any sharp changes in perspective between characters – unless it was necessary to tell the story.

We also ended up working with two new crew members: the versatile Mary Hronicek, who set-dressed and handled continuity, and Kaeli Black, who handled – well, just about everything else on set. They dramatically reduced the amount of time it took us to switch physical positions within our filming location by prepping the next area while we were filming or blocking in another. This was more help than normal, as our production designer was one of the principal actors, and would have normally had to do that work himself. Our lighting designer / gaffer was also acting, so having additional crew members to help with light positioning and arrangement was crucial to working under a deadline.

At around 6:30 - 7:00 P.M., we finished up shooting, and headed back down to Connecticut. It took about an hour to move all of the approximately 500 GB of raw footage and audio onto the editing station (damn you, antiquated eSATA interface!), and editing got underway at 9:00 P.M. Curtis was unable to join us for editing this time, due to scheduling conflicts in Massachusetts.

We finished our first completed rough cut around 11:00 - 11:30 P.M. I went through and did all of the major audio replacement and correction work (fixing lines which weren’t recorded properly, etc) and rendered out both OMF exports for the audio engineer and an MP4 low-res copy for our composer, Garett Schmidt. As soon as they had uploaded to Google Drive, I messaged Rob and Garett with the link, plugged in my phone to charge, and promptly fell asleep on my face on the couch.

Day Three: Post-Production and Dropoff

Woke up at 7:00 A.M. (since we got the credits done the night before), walked down the street to get a cup of coffee, and started work on color grading. I wrapped up initial color grading (with one shot worth of stabilization for a dolly shot which had technical issues) around 9:45 A.M. I rendered everything out as separate clips and reimported into the NLE software, then rendered out a scratch copy and uploaded as private Youtube video so that our producer could look for any issues.

Around 1 P.M. we got the audio mixed with score back from our sound engineer, Rob. I did a quick review of the video to make sure everything was in order before we continued on.

After watching it through again, we identified three issues: there was coloring missing from a particularly difficult multiple light color shot, the stabilization algo had malfunctioned catastrophically, and there was a non-diegetic sound missing. The first and third issues were remedied quickly – but the second one turned into a bit of an issue.

I completely retracked it and removed all non-background points twice, but both times the image “jumped” at a certain point. I ended up using (ugh) Warp Stabilizer in Premiere to smooth out the instability a little, but I blew almost an hour trying to fix that single shot.

To add insult to injury, Media Encoder decided suddenly not to want to encode the video, freezing a few seconds in. Thankfully exporting directly out of the NLE worked fine. We burned a data DVD and made a USB key copy, had Nick test it out in the DVD drive and USB port on his laptop – to ensure that it would be readable on another device – and jumped into Jon’s car to head out. (Jon, by the way, is the crew member who always ends up driving me to dropoffs whenever I have to make them, since I can’t see straight by the end of the 48.)

After getting slightly lost twice in Providence, despite the assistance of Google Maps, we arrived to drop off our deliverables at 6:08 P.M. on Sunday, giving us a little less than an hour and a half before the final deadline. There was a minor paperwork scramble, due to a miscommunication between the 48 Hour Film Project instructions and our producer, but a quick set of messages to him straightened it out. Done!

Post-Mortem Analysis

The good:

Writing time. We had a script done within three hours of receiving our constraints, and less than two hours after getting a concept approved. This is a testament to the efficiency of our writers, Natasha Darius (my lovely wife) and Nicholas Magrey. They managed to put together something subtle, yet somewhat outrageous at the same time.

Monitoring footage. Using the SDI-HDMI converter with a monitor was a smart move; it allowed everyone to monitor what they needed to monitor without causing a traffic jam behind the camera. It also allowed actors to see whether or not they were on camera, in certain situations.

Few, if any, specialty shots. We didn’t spin up the gimbal, snorricam, shoulder mount, or any other specialty rigs besides a single jib shot in the beginning and an ill-fated dolly shot in the third act. Some of this had to do with pulling comedy as a genre – and it almost certainly forgoes any sort of consideration for a Cinematography award of any sort, as that seems to be relegated to fancy stuff – but we focused far more on telling a funny story than trying to astound the viewer with slider shots, drones, or passing gimbals through windows. Truth be told, some of the light and grading work in setting up shots to work over a moving light temperature (the sun, as it changed position in the sky) was pretty complicated and artfully executed, but it’s not anything wowing. That being said, I wouldn’t change any of it.

Organization. Using the racking system in the vehicle and keeping hair and makeup separate from the rest of the shoot made organization far easier than it had been in past. We brought more equipment than we needed without compromising our ability to use other pieces because of the amount of storage space we had.

The not-so-good:

Equipment Preparation. Entirely my fault, but we hadn’t done a full functional test of the rails and dolly in quite some time, so we would have noticed that we didn’t have the proper shimming to keep the system from moving, as well as requiring some additional height to clear the grass for a completely smooth run. This would have completely eliminated the need for stabilization in post (which I hate), saving me time and sanity in that process.

Cross-talk and blocking time. We tend to run a pretty “familial” set, and so we tend not to be harsh or commanding when dealing with actors. This fomented some issues with timing, as we ended up waiting on some people for hair and makeup who could have been done earlier, waiting on people to stop cross-chatting during shooting, and waiting on people to be available for blocking.

Periodically messy camerawork. Some of my focus pulling was not completely accurate. I’m not sure whether I should have just had my 1st AC pull focus for me or whether I just needed to use the loupe more extensively on my EVF, but reviewing the final footage now still shows some of that. There is also a single shot where there are a few minor hot spots on the footage.

Tunnel vision. I wasted a fair amount of time trying to correct something (an annoyingly unsteady rail shot) rather than either:

Planning the shot differently (zoom lens, gimbal, etc)

Cutting losses much sooner in the grading/post process and editing around the undesirable footage or using different methods as soon as it became immediately apparent that it wasn’t functioning properly.

Lack of on-set schedule. Even in a time-constrained environment like a 48 Hour Film Project, we could have set up a scene schedule at the beginning of the day so that we would know how far behind schedule we were falling. This could have served to both motivate and keep the cast and crew focused, as well as allowing more effective time management during scenes.

Overall, I’m happy with the way Buck’s Bed & Breakfast turned out, even though I can (as always) see the technical flaws still left in.

]]>2015-06-29T18:54:23-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/06/29/why-batman-begins-is-the-greatest-origin-film-of-all-timeThis argument originated in a rather unconventional way: it was dropped in my lap. The AV Club’s Scott Eric Kaufmann (or “SEK” for short) dropped this on me in a particularly interesting Facebook thread; in his words:

Because I just can’t with today anymore, I’m just going to say that Batman Begins is the greatest origin film ever, and let the brilliant Jeff Buchbinder defend my position. Did he ask me to do this? No. Did he want me to do this? Probably not. But can he do it? Without a doubt.

Challenge: accepted.

What is an “origin film”, anyway?

An “origin film”, at least, in the context of this discussion, is the first in an epistemological film system comprised of one or more properties which defines the origin of the main (usually titular) character.

This differs from films which show the formations of teams and leagues of superheroes in that those films do not necessarily illustrate the actual genesis of the titular character(s). A notable example to this would be Fantastic Four, as it showed the acquisition of special abilities for the titular characters on screen, as well as their metamorphoses into their eventual characters. The first of the Hulk reboot films (Hulk, courtesy of Ang Lee) would fall under this definition, but the second (The Incredible Hulk, courtesy of Louis Leterrier) would not; in the Leterrier film, Bruce Banner has already become “the Hulk” off-screen, even though a certain degree of fan service to this process is paid through the initial credit sequence.

It should be noted that one of the commenters on the aforementioned thread asked, somewhat jokingly, if The 400 Blows could be considered an origin story for François Truffaut. (It fits the definition of an origin film, incidentally.)

An origins episode is an episode, issue, chapter, or a multi-part story arc that exists primarily to examine the origin of a character or setting after the work has been going for a while. Many prequels qualify, but not all. Likewise whilst many things have had extended flashbacks it does not necessarily count. However the episode or issue need not be all set in the universe’s past to qualify, so long as exploring that past in the point. Done well these works help build the universe’s mythos and continuity; done badly they just feel like the author trying to show how clever they are. Worse still are the origins episodes where the writer does not bother to check their own continuity and creates a mess of plot holes and poor characterization.

The Batman as a primal archetype

It is unsurprising that Batman is the most popular hero on social media, while his most famous nemesis is the most popular villain. Batman has had more analysis devoted to him, as well as an impressive collection of epistemological material across several reboots and mediums, than any other superhero of which I am aware. There’s even a Psychology Today article about the primal archetype(s) underscoring the popularity of The Batman, in A Dark and Stormy Knight: Why Batman?(cite), in addition to several books and articles.

Whether it be his self-made superhero nature, the universal internal darkness in which he dwells, the pantheon of colorful foes he fights, or the primal fear which he exudes, The Batman is a very powerful cultural force. This is recognized through the vast array of comics, television material, multi-auteur epistemological film systems, adjunct films (The Suicide Squad is already incredibly popular – months before its theatrical release), and vast array of insanelyvariedmerchandising.

In another, somewhat expected, aside: I have been trying to collect data to look at the source of fandom surrounding The Batman through an online survey.

Batman Begins as Film

Batman Begins, as a film, is quite good. It benefits from agile direction from Christopher Nolan, intricate and precise camerawork from Wally Pfister, and a compelling storyline based (somewhat) on a number of graphic novels and comic lines, including Frank Miller’s “Batman: Year One” – not to mention a varied and relatively impressive cast.

Batman Begins and the Process of Elimination

In order to determine which film is the best origin film, I’m looking at two criteria:

Is this a good film?

Is this a good origin story?

The origin of Darth Vader in the Star Wars prequels, for example, would be excluded due to the dodgy nature of the quality of those films. (If you really need a full elucidation of this, please visit Mr. Plinkett for more information.) Luke’s origin is tied into the prequels, as well, so we can discount Star Wars-related films entirely.

Batman Begins is both a good, artful film and a good origin story, especially due to its subject matter (the powerful Batman archetype). It’s very difficult to make that same assessment of other films, since there are no other strict Batman origin films, and few origin films pass as being extremely artful.

Films like Guardians of the Galaxy are less accessible; they require a “normal person” through which they can be experienced, which decreases the potential relatability of the main character, unless that main character is the “normal person”. This tends to result in a predictable trope where the “normal” main character becomes The Jesus, who was Special All Along. Examples of this would be Keanu Reeves’ “Neo” in The Matrix, Rufus Sewell’s “John Murdock” in Dark City, and Mila Kunis’ titular “Jupiter Jones” in Jupiter Ascending. Though archetypal, these stories are far more common and overused than something like the Batman mythos, which touches on a number of dark and sensitive parts of the human psyche.

Conclusion

By necessity, the greatest origin film of all time would belong to the greatest archetypal hero of the modern era: The Batman. As the best (and most valid) example of a Batman origin film is “Batman Begins”, it must, by necessity, be the greatest origin film.

I also suggest reading the original thread, as there are quite a few interesting sub-topic discussions, including a few about The Batman’s role in society. This is one of my more memorable notes:

There’s potentially an interesting dichotomy to be found in the artificial differences which we believe lie between vigilantes and superheroes. I remember that the 1960’s era Semple Batman series made it very clear that Batman was deputized to act as an officer of the law – otherwise he would have been potentially seen as a vigilante. The rise of the film “anti-hero” and the emergence of the neo-noir film genre probably played substantial roles in legitimizing the idea of superhero as masked vigilante – but vigilantes who have some sort of Greater Good in mind. The second Nolan Batman film lampshaded that artificial divide by having Really Nice Rich Guy Bruce Wayne admonish another Batman-suit-clad vigilante for not having enough money to do the Batman thing.

]]>2015-06-22T16:20:27-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/06/22/orange-is-the-new-black-trust-no-bitch-relationship-dynamicsThe Jenji Kohan series “Orange is the New Black” has been lauded for its portrayal of a Connecticut womens’ prison, including a cast of diversified characters. Less attention has been given to its excellent and intricate camerawork. I’m going to examine a scene from the last episode of the third season, entitled “Trust No Bitch”.

Warning: There be spoilers here (albiet relatively small ones).

Much is made over the first three seasons of “Orange” about Sam Healy’s rocky relationship with his mail-order Russian bride, with who he communicates via Kate Mulgrew’s Galina Reznikov. She is shown to be generally disinterested and dissatisfied with Healy, constantly threatening to leave him.

The scene I’m analyzing is the confrontation between Healy and his wife which brings the story arc surrounding their relationship dynamic to its pinnacle.

Healy has just had a great day at Litchfield prison, and has come home to his despondent wife, who is sitting at the kitchen table. We start with Healy inside an artificial frame formed by the doorway, draped in shadows.

His wife is first shown (in the initial framing) to be marginally on the right side of the frame and out of focus. We’re given a reverse shot from Healy’s point of view, evidenced by the angle at which she is seen. Much like his internal perception of his wife, she is very much in the center of the frame, although there is something slightly askew in the way she is presented – even though we can’t initially identify it. She is pushing the boundary of the frame, uncomfortably pushed into a space in which she finds little comfort.

Next, we’re shown the wide shot, giving us a view of the entire stage area of the scene. This shot is used a few times during the standard shot / reverse-shot rhythm. In the initial view we have of this shot, both characters are clustered to the right side of the frame, forming an external indication of the relationship dynamic. Healy is crowding her into a corner of the frame, even though he is physically nowhere near her.

We jump cut in further to reestablish the comfortable boundaries, allowing the characters to return to their standard thirds:

Healy begins to regale her with his Litchfield stories as we jump cut back out to the previous framing. Their eyeline lies along a diagonal third, but there’s still a conspicuous amount of negative space on the left side of the frame – she is still trapped, even if Healy’s body language isn’t clearly indicating it.

As Healy talks, we settle into a very comfortable shot / reverse-shot rhythm. Both of them sit slightly inside the thirds, making us subconsciously aware of the claustrophobia inherent in the relationship. Her body is facing away from him, even when her eyes and face are towards him.

As Healy begins to become upset, the camera cuts back; rather than going to the reverse shot of Healy, we go to what is almost a cropped two-shot, as he pulls away backwards from her.

We go back to the shot / reverse-shot rhythm.

As the confrontation picks up steam, we cut back to the wide shot. Healy and his wife are still along one of the diagonal thirds, but there is also a butcher block with a knife sticking out of it and a Russian nesting doll – slightly out of focus – along the other diagonal third, paralleling the fighting couple. Healy is dead center frame for this, with his wife still marginalized in the corner.

The next two screen captures illustrate the next shot, which is a traditional two shot with the actors on the vertical thirds. The focus starts on the wife as Healy bangs his fist on the sink …

… then pulls to Healy as he begins to get louder. The wife is also progressively marginalized in the frame as we move forward. More importantly, this framing represents, as Healy is pulled into focus, how he perceives his place in the relationship; he is distant, no matter how close he tries to get to his wife.

In the reverse, we can see the situation from his wife’s point of view; she is centered (or rather, her seating position is centered, even though she’s leaning into the proper position, camera or otherwise), with the imposing form of Sam Healy looming over her.

They switch to Russian, and Healy asks what she wants from him. Even though this could have been a shot from his wife’s point of view, it isn’t; this is just a closer version of the same objective shot we’ve seen earlier.

She responds to the looming shadow “My freedom” in Russian …

… and the more important shot – Healy’s reaction – is left for us to consume. We flip back and forth between the shots which have been set up to show us a shot / reverse-shot setup at the same time that they are giving us an external representation of the internal perception of their relationship.

As the wife begins to realize that she may have been granted her freedom, she is shown by herself, in the center of the frame.

In the final moments of the confrontation, as well as his marriage, Sam Healy can’t find a comfortable place in the frame, even as his soon-to-be-ex wife sits comfortably in a central framing position, leaning into the right third. She is shown to be balanced, even as Healy’s self-assessment of his place in the relationship is represented by his inability to stay in a comfortable framing …

… he is either pushed out of being comfortably represented in the frame:

… or made diminutive through additional headspace in the frame.

“I’m surrounded by women in captivity all day long. I don’t need to come home to another one who feels like she’s trapped in a cage.” - Sam Healy

I tend to enjoy external representations of internal relationships and character properties through careful camerawork, and “Orange is the New Black” performed marvelously with this scene.

(All images are presented under fair use guidelines – all frame grabs are property of Tilted Productions, Lionsgate Television, or any other entities who hold copyright on this film. They are presented for exclusively educational purposes.)

]]>2015-05-26T20:43:35-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/05/26/mad-men-severance-misleading-expectationsMad Men’s highly anticipated final season’s second half began with an interesting sequence which uses the expectations we have about the kind of man Donald Draper is to set up one of the best paraprosdokian scenes in the series.

(Apart from potentially spoiling this single sequence, this writeup does not give away any plot points from the last season.)

There are many adulatory and superlative terms which could be used to describe the flawed persona of Mad Men’s Donald Draper – but if a pejorative term had to be produced, it would probably be a toss-up between “drunk” and “letch”. We expect him to go after any woman with a heartbeat, as it’s an integral part of the character’s construction; he’s a very broken character, which is presumably what draws us to him.

The episode opens on a medium closeup shot of a woman in a fur coat with no dialogue. She’s aligned on the left third of the frame, looking expectantly out into the empty space opposite from her.

Flip to the apparent reverse shot: a medium closeup shot of our dubious protagonist, Mr. Draper, occupying the right third of the frame. He’s smoking, and also looking expectantly into the empty space in his frame.

The woman finally speaks, setting up a shot / reverse-shot dynamic to confirm that she is, indeed speaking to Don.

Context plays an important role in the comprehension of this scene; without knowing who either of the characters are, we assume that these two could be in an intimate setting – but knowing who Don is, we accept it without apprehension. After all, we’ve seen him engage in countless trysts over the seven year run of Mad Men.

His next line confirms what we’ve been thinking:

“You’re not supposed to talk.”

Instead of going back to the medium closeup of Don, we lean-out to a medium shot, where we can see that Don is holding a cup of coffee. He’s still occupying the right third, but we can now see that he’s leaning against the wall.

The reverse of the unnamed woman also leans out to a standard medium shot, but we observe her through a mirror, which occupies the left third instead of her. She doesn’t say anything.

We continue the same shot / reverse-shot pattern for another rotation …

… then Don says:

“Don’t open the whole coat. Just try to make it look like you’re just wearing the fur.”

Something is off about this situation, even though we’re not initially aware of exactly what it is. The framing, so far, has been relatively intimate and close, although the shots have been getting wider.

We jump cut to a medium-wide shot, with the two characters occupying the same positions on the vertical thirds.

Further complicating the matter of our interpretation of the scene, Don gives her the following directive:

“Now, I want you to close your eyes and take a deep breath. And when I tell you, you’re gonna put your leg up on that chair, let the coat slide down, and show me how smooth your skin is.”

We are then treated to this juxtaposition of images …

… which clearly evoke the notion of sexual tension or foreshadowing. The camera has jumped back in to a more intimate close framing with the medium close-up.

As Don drops his cigarette into his coffee (which can be viewed, in the context of what we’ve seen so far, as a potential sexual metaphor), we jump into a close-up shot montage, showing what we believe to be an intimate moment:

But what is this – we jump back out to a medium-wide shot, as we show the unnamed woman walking between the vertical thirds:

Reverse the angle so that we’re behind her, and both her and Don are still in the same basic frame positions which we originally saw them in, but framed in a medium-wide shot.

We can see what looks to be the entire room, although a number of objects are acting as blocking cards, keeping us from seeing the entirety of the scene.

Back to intimate close-ups, this time juxtaposing her legs …

… and his face. The Kuleshov Effect is implying that he is staring at her legs; that the close-up scanning view of her is actually Don’s point of view.

And back to a close-up of her face, slightly larger in frame, but occupying the same position as his.

Now, Don reacts in an ambiguous way, which we believe confirms what we’ve been seeing and hearing …

… but it doesn’t. The setup is a lie, confirmed by the angle which the camera has so carefully avoided:

We were never shown the space between the two characters, and by the use of a longer lens to compress the space between them, we were not aware that there were not only four other people in the room, but that they were between the two characters we’ve seen.

This would not have been possible without our pre-existing expectations for Don’s character and without some very clever visual trickery.

Using the mirror as a device to indicate deception is a common practice in noir and neo-noir films and television, but it’s not often used to indicate deception as part of the perspective with which we are presented the diegetic reality of the scene.

This reveal reminds me of the Gilliam reveals from Baron Munchausen; Hornbacher shows you everything – or so you believe – only to show you that he has been misleading you the entire time.

(All images are presented under fair use guidelines – all frame grabs are property of Lionsgate Television, Weiner Brothers, American Movie Classics (AMC), or any other entities who hold copyright on this film. They are presented for exclusively educational purposes.)

]]>2015-05-22T21:22:49-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/05/22/daredevil-and-falling-down-character-descentI wouldn’t normally associate the 1993 Schumacher film Falling Down with the Netflix/Marvel Daredevil series, especially since Schumacher didn’t astound me, given the source material he had to work with. However, there is a common thread between the two properties besides their antagonists’ initials – the descent of their characters and how they perceive themselves.

Act I – Establishing a Character: William Foster and Wilson Fisk

Falling Down presents us with a simple premise: a man, William Foster, snaps after a long series of crippling setbacks. Schumacher introduces him with an extreme closeup:

which pulls out to start a very long steadicam shot, revealing his isolation in his car. There is also a very prominent American flag displayed behind his head, revealed to be hung on a nearby bus.

We start with a claustrophobic view of Foster, proceeding to pull outwards and show him as but a single element in a large tapestry of people stuck in the same apparent situation.

The film presents two potential protagonists: Michael Douglas’ William Foster and Robert Duvall’s Prendergast. They both are introduced as neutral characters – although Prendergast is shown, through a number of tried-and-true police tropes, to be a good person, while Foster’s character is taken in a different direction entirely.

Wilson Fisk is first introduced to us as a mysterious character in the third of thirteen episodes in Daredevil’s first season. Murdock/Daredevil drags his name out of John Healy before he impales himself – and we first see the mysterious Wilson Fisk as the camera pans from left to right across an art gallery.

The art gallery’s owner, Vanessa, approaches him as she attempts to make smalltalk about the painting …

… which she jokes about by comparing to a joke about a “rabbit in a snowstorm”.

Fisk’s face cannot be seen throughout this. He is either left out of the diegetic space or shadowed, much like Frank Costello in The Departed. We are presented an implicit sketch of Fisk’s character in this way – hiding in plain sight, much like the rabbit in the snowstorm.

We first see his whole face as Vanessa asks him how it makes him feel.

Fisk replies that it makes him feel “alone”. The first time we see his face, it is half-shadowed, as if to imply that he is a complex morally ambiguous character.

Act II – Character Development

Foster’s arc is a downward spiral throughout the course of the film. The more information we are given about him and his reactions to the situations with which he is presented, the more we realize that he isn’t a particularly good person. Prendergast is presented as a counterpoint to this character – he is consistently rendered as a good character oppressed by those around him, but he never lashes out as Foster does.

Fisk, like his full-face-half-shadowed introduction, has two parallel character developments. One pertains to the exposition of his criminal enterprises and his interactions with Murdock/Daredevil. This arc is a downward spiral, as Fisk is shown to be a reprehensible character who would kill anyone who stood between him and his vision. The second arc is his character’s internal perception of himself as well as his relationship with Vanessa. He is shown to be a visionary (as seen in his public persona when first revealed) with a bold vision for the future of Hell’s Kitchen, as well as a caring and compassionate man in his relationship with Vanessa.

Act III – Denouement and Realization

Foster is confronted by Prendergast as he tries to meet with his estranged wife and daughter. After Prendergast gets them safely away from Foster, he lays out what he believes to be the most likely scenario which would have unfolded.

Prendergast: “You know exactly what you were gonna do. Kill your wife and child! Then it’d be too late to turn back. It’d be easy to kill yourself. Let’s go meet some nice policemen. They’re good guys. Let’s go.”

Foster: “I’m the bad guy? How did that happen? I did everything they told me to.”

Even though we are aware of his descent from a theoretically ordinary member of society to a violent criminal, he hasn’t been aware of it. We tend to be the most blind when it comes to seeing ourselves, and Foster is no exception. Schumacher presented us with an anti-hero – but he turned out to be the villain. Our tendency would have been to identify with Foster, but we’re left conflicted when we realize that we’ve been sympathizing with the wrong guy. The moral ambiguity of where he became the villain is left up to the reflection of the audience; Foster chooses to kill himself rather than try to fix the shambles of the life he once had.

Fisk’s revelation also occurs when he’s confronted with his actions by law enforcement. He is being transported in the back of a police transport, guarded by two heavily armed guards:

Fisk: “I was thinking about a story from the Bible. I’m not a religious man but I’ve read bits and pieces over the years. Curiosity more than faith. But this one story… There was a man. He was traveling from when he was set upon by men of ill intent. They stripped the traveler of his clothes, they beat him, and they left him bleeding in the dirt. And a priest happened by saw the traveler. But he moved to the other side of the road and continued on. And then a Levite, a religious functionary, he came to the place, saw the dying traveler. But he too moved to the other side of the road, passed him by. But then came a man from Samaria, a Samaritan, a good man. He saw the traveler bleeding in the road and he stopped to aid him without thinking of the circumstance or the difficulty it might bring him. The Samaritan tended to the traveler’s wounds, applying oil and wine. And he carried him to an inn, gave him all the money he had for the owner to take care of the traveler, as the Samaritan, he continued on his journey. He did this simply because the traveler was his neighbor. He loved his city and all the people in it. I always thought that I was the Samaritan in that story. It’s funny, isn’t it? How even the best of men can be deceived by their true nature.”

As he tells his story, we draw into Fisk until he’s too large for the frame. The other men in the same physical space as him are only there to bear witness – they will soon be completely irrelevant.

Fisk: “It means that I’m not the Samaritan. That I’m not the priest, or the Levite. That I am the ill intent who set upon the traveler on a road that he should not have been on.”

Although we have, through the narrative of the detective procedural idiom in which we have viewed Murdock and Foggy’s investigation into the corruption in Hell’s Kitchen, have viewed Fisk as the root of the terrible evil we have seen, Fisk has not seen himself that way until now. In a way, Murdock/Daredevil has facilitated the rebirth of Wilson Fisk as Kingpin – a theme that evokes Batman dumping Jack Napier into a vat of chemicals creating the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman.

Despite violent behavior, including beating people to death with his bare hands (and with an SUV door, in one case), Fisk has seen his actions as being part of a greater good for the city he loves, much as Foster saw his actions as part of a greater good for his family. Neither of these men’s actions were perceived externally as purveying benefits to others, and, until confronted with the harsh truth of others’ perceptions of them, saw themselves as heroes of their own lives. The denouement in both of these works are important because of the perceptual shifts in each of their villains.

It’s interesting to note that, while Foster came to his realization through a direct conflict with the actual protagonist of the film, Prendergast, Fisk was driven to his realization through a culmination of the actions of the actual protagonist of his filmic universe, Murdock/Daredevil. The latter affords, I believe, a more subtle realization and produces a more interesting film experience.

(All images are presented under fair use guidelines – all frame grabs are property of Alcor Films, Canal+, Regency Enterprises, ABC Studios, DeKnight Productions, Goddard Textiles, or any other entities who hold copyright on this film. They are presented for exclusively educational purposes.)

]]>2015-05-17T18:54:42-04:00http://jbuchbinder.com/2015/05/17/differences-between-film-and-theaterBefore film became possible through Edison and the Lumière Brothers’ fantastical inventions, theater had reigned as the primary dramatic performance artform for thousands of years. Though sharing much of the same lineage, there are fundamental differences in the way that film and theater are conceived, planned, acted, and consumed.

Diagetic space in film vs stage space in theater

Theater has, by its nature, a single frame through which everything is viewed. The stage (and sometimes the theater itself) forms the space which contains the entire epistemic system of the play. There are a number of meta-theatrical productions (Nunsense comes to mind) as well as a number of plays which directly address the audience as part of the set (Gypsy does this in the first scene; the theater is both the theater of our reality and the theater represented in the epistemological system of the play), but even then, the audience is still perceiving a series of actions and reactions which occur within the confines of a limited physical space. Theatrical productions tend to get around this through creative use of scenery and backdrop changes – but the audience’s frame of reference is still the stage in front of them.

Film uses the notion of diegetic space – the space which is in front of the camera, or can be perceived – along with the notion of non-diegetic action and sound which occurs off-camera. This means that the mise-en-scène can dynamically change and with it our perception of the action and dialogue taking place.

Montage theory and discontinity

Few films rely on a single non-changing perspective which would mirror that of a theater stage ; some of this may have to do with the inherent limitations of resolution and detail reproduction on film, but I would hypothesize that it tended to happen before films evolved from fixed camera short subject moving pictures. Following this train of thought, I believe that film technique evolved because the possibilities of a series of changing frames being stitched together through perspective changes allowed film to step outside of the confines of a single stream of temporally equidistant images.

Beyond traditional Montage Theory, which stresses continuity, film also opens itself to the possibility of discontinuous editing. This can enable innovative storytelling techniques like the one used in Deconstructing Harry or some of the ever-prevalent dream sequences used in much of modern film.

It should be noted that some aspects of film montage theory are present in certain theatrical works. Overlapping conversations playing out on different parts of the stage create a holistic montage effect by forcing the viewer to effectively produce “cuts” by swiveling his/her attention between two or more situations. This is not as formalized as actual film cuts produced by editing, as the audience still remains in charge of what they are choosing to see.

Forced perspective and shifting vision through the lens of the camera

As mentioned earlier, film relies on the notion of diegetic space to present its epistemological reality; this allows the filmmaker to force us to view the world through his/her eyes. Unlike a theater patron, we are not able to view the entire artificial world of the set to focus on different areas all of the time. Shifting to closer shots or differing perspectives forces us to view at least a part of this artificial world in the way that its auteur prescribes. It is a much less holistic view of that world when considered in that way.

There are several notions in film which reveal some of its theatrical roots. One of the most notable of these is the concept of the 180 degree rule. Having an imaginary line which (at least in most conventional non-arthouse cinema) cannot be crossed references the notion of a theater stage plane; no one can cross behind a theater set to view behind characters, and as such, we cannot understand jumping behind characters in most standard film editing montages.

Lens optics, light, and CGI

Theater is seen with a single lens: that of the human eye. It has a single focal length, a particular depth-of-field, and can only view practical effects (effects which actually exist in front of it). In comparison, the world of film is rife with variable length lensing, varying depth-of-field, and composited effects which did not exist during the on-set performances – not to mention post-production effects and color grading/correction.

Theater lighting is dynamic, insofar as it can be controlled via switches or an electronic console. But, during the observed performance, the lighting which exists within the confines of the visible set is the permanent light through which the performance will be viewed. If a light should be warmer or colder, it cannot be adjusted later, as that single performance (or set of single performances) are the only time(s) where that lighting will matter.

Impermanence over many performances vs permanence over a highlight reel

Theater is the act of propagating a story; effectively giving it a kind of permanence through the act of repetitive impermanence. A show taking place on a stage has a series of characters, props, and other technical considerations which come together specifically for that series of performances, then are dismantled afterward. Performances exist only in the moment when they are observed, to be carried on by memory or repetition by others. “Set strike” is an activity which signals the end of the life of a theatrical series of performances; the set is effectively buried collectively by the cast and crew members, perhaps to rise again through repeat performances in the same or different venue.

Film, in contrast, provides permanence through celluloid (and more recently digital medium). It is not a record of what has occurred. It is not a single performance. It is effectively a “highlight reel” of the most pertinent moments of a series of performances which has been stitched together by the skill of an editor and post-production crew. It can be viewed many times, but the only thing that will change will be the viewer; what has been captured on film is immutable and permanent.

Actors and the best take: splicing together performances

Taking that into consideration, it is important to consider the effect which using multiple takes and angles has on actors and the characters they portray. The editing process in film makes it possible to create that “highlight reel” of performances, as well as show the characters based on different aspects, angles, vantage points, and even different physical space. (Cheating angles is an example of this.)

Instead of forcing an actor to do all of their preparatory work beforehand, certain decisions can be made by the director and editor to allow multiple performance possibilities to be whittled down into a single succinct final product.

Stage actors cannot, for example, be cut off during a live theater performance if they choose to change an aspect of their character in that performance. On film, a director can call “cut” and have the actor adjust their performance to better suit the overall aesthetic of the film.

Subtle film and bombastic theater: effective emoting and communicating with the audience

The method actor may have trouble dealing with the confines of film. Instead of having a more-or-less complete world to work within, an actor may be faced with partial sets, chromakeying (greenscreening), and playing across from characters who are not actually there for their filmed takes.

Emoting is much easier for a theater actor when they are able to communicate with their audience, but this simply isn’t possible in a direct way through the medium of film.

Reactive theater and predictive film: communicating and responding to the audience

Both film and theater have an audience component to them. For film, it is a viewer which must interpret a number of factors to attempt to assess an interpretation of the auteur’s vision and the actor’s performances over one or more viewings of the same source material. For theater, the viewer can interpret a differing performance over multiple viewings – but they can never go back to a past performance or attempt to reinterpret something they have seen through the fresh-eyed perception of a different time in their life. For theater-goers, the performance changes every time it is presented.

Both audiences react to what is presented to them. In theater, performers often feed off of the reactions of theater patrons, which can fuel their performances or alter their reactions in response. Film requires a predictive approach, since the audience is separated by both time and layers of post-processing. Irving Thalberg famously ran stage shows of certain scenes of “A Night at the Opera” in order to measure how much time the Marx Brothers needed to leave for the audience’s laughter to die down between jokes – but most film productions do not have the benefit of such ostentatious overtures. Film actors have to predictively assess what their audience will be experiencing and tune their performances accordingly.

Conclusion

There are a plethora of differences between film and theater – and neither is clearly superior in terms of the benefits it offers actors or the people who watch their performances. I tend to favor film because of the level of permanence it offers, but I can see why others could (and do) favor theater.

I’d like to thank the group of film/theater actors who I had consulted about the acting aspects which differ between the mediums.